Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

The Beast sunk his great head on to his paws. ‘You will come back to me? It will be lonely here, without you.’ 

She was moved almost to tears that he should care for her so. It was in her heart to drop a kiss upon his shaggy mane but, though she stretched out her hand towards him, she could not bring herself to touch him of her own free will, he was so different from herself. But, yes, she said; ‘I will come back. Soon, before the winter is over.’

Then the taxi came and took her away.”

Angela Carter, The Courtship of Mr Lyon 

“I don’t even know what to do with a kid for five hours.”

“Ben,” he heard Poe’s distracted, please-don’t-kill-my-vibe sigh.

Finn was murmuring somewhere near the phone, both of them probably knee deep in rosé and the satisfaction of having no kid with them: the latter of which was Kylo’s chosen reality every single day . “We gave you a list of approved activities.”

It was easy to pretend they were perfect parents when their kid was parked on a subway platform with Kylo white-knuckling the hood of his tiny jacket like a leash.

So he wouldn’t run away, obviously.

But he was still getting weird looks from other commuters.

They could judge all the wanted. Safety first.

Freder seemed well-behaved; but children were tiny and unpredictable and trains in New York were large and unpredictable so he was not letting go until they were both on seats and the doors were securely closed.

“I just find many of them to be…”

Poe groaned.

“You agreed to take him so I could have one evening alone with my partner.”

“I was badgered into it,” Kylo donned, for a moment of relief, his coldest negotiating tone. Poe could handle it. He was flustered; leaving work early to run to a daycare center and fight his way through nannies and mommy bloggers just to babysit. A job he didn’t even want to do. “And I told you I was coming from work. I’m not doing parent-child yoga in this suit.”

Poe sighed. Kylo heard Finn mutter something in the background, and then laugh.

“He goes to New York Public Library every week for storytime at four. He was just there Thursday, but it you want to be fussy about what you’re caught doing with your godson, try that.”

“You’re his parent. Making me his godfather was your first mistake,” Kylo hissed, and tiny, curly-haired Freder tilted his moon-like head up to set his ancient, all-seeing eyes on Kylo’s face.

Looking eerily and utterly betrayed as though perceiving every ounce of Kylo’s lack of enthusiasm.

Then he tried to run full-speed to the end of his leash -his little gray hood still in his godparent’s fist- and Kylo had to pick him up to prevent the kid’s obvious deathwish.

Kylo was supposed to be “Uncle Ben” now; but that never felt like a real person. It was more like a drunk friend you made brunch plans with as you helped them into a cab home.

‘Sure, I’m Uncle Ben, yeah, I’ll go to your kid’s baptism, text me, just text me’

And then being held to those brunch plans for the rest of his life. Adopting a name he never used anymore for a kid.

Kylo had never liked children in the first place but there was something about Freder that was incredibly off-putting to him; like the face of a God so horrible your eyes melted if you looked directly at it.

Now that little ageless face was creeping ever-closer to his own.

Finn and Poe were so normal and normal-looking. Who was their egg donor that this was the result?

“Story time?” Kylo blurted out to appease the wide eyes of this toddler; who probably didn’t grasp all the nuance of a phone conversation but as Poe kept reminding him, was probably still offended because he knew what words and emotions were.

Making him, sometimes, more advanced than his godparent.

The kid simply and automatically replied:

“Ferdinand.”

With cult-like devotion.

Which sounded like a yes.

So they would go to NYPL. He was already rerouting his mental map to W41st.

Because Kylo was bad with kids; and this kid was fucking weird.

“There was a little bull and his name was Ferdinand…”

Her lipsticked mouth twisted in happy mischief; some children left hanging on her every word, while some others were still pretty occupied with removing their shoes and socks by whatever means necessary.

The library was soft in a rumbly hush; there was no true quiet in this part of the city, but they were in a muffled bubble where every child making a sound could be heard in that sacred, story-time reverence.

But her stage-whispered, rushed excitement made what was going to happen to the little bull very compelling.

Short, neat, dark-painted nails flipped through the pages, theatrically tilting the opened book so her audience could see.

Most parents and nannies were texting, on iPads, or half-asleep in too-small chairs for their designated hour of peace.

And the Story Lady captivated her wiggly audience.

Kylo hovered amongst the shelves, fielding a slight blow-up back at the office that occurred without his carefully crafted oversight. He would probably have to slip out to make a phone call, but emails were coming hard and fast so he fielded those in self-defense first.

His eyes would flicker up from between the stacks.

She was pretty. Precise. Her face malleable to open expressions. She sat up very straight. Talked very clearly and crisply. Even though the text wasn’t particularly challenging, she was obviously well-read, pleasant, and volunteering at a library when she could have been doing... anythingelse.

If she didn’t dress like a schoolteacher; he might have made a play for her when this was over, but because she did, he’d probably incorporate it into some perverse fantasy later on.

And her voice:

Her accent and the depth of her voice had a sugared quality, burnt like caramel, slow and careful like it dripped onto him from a hot pan.

And nothing she was saying about a bull who liked to smell flowers was particularly sexy. She didn’t even look at all obscene: she was dressed to volunteer with toddlers at a library. But it was that voice, almost better when he closed his eyes, blocked everything else out.

He found himself glancing up at her between emails, more than he should, and her smile and her enthusiasm flattened out his anxiety into a state of-

He put his phone away for a thirty-minute stretch for the first time in years.

He was caught under her voice. Utterly. Caught to the story.

“And for all I know he is sitting there still, under his favorite cork tree, smelling the flowers just quietly.”

“Freder’s come to see the lions again.”

The acoustics of a Midtown dusk were reaching a crescendo, and Kylo looked over his shoulder to see it was the Story Lady who had spoken, who he had just been thinking about, now appearing before him and smiling up at his godson.

Who was currently being raised over his head to pet a stone-carved mane of one of the Lions flanking the library entrance.

She wore a wool coat tailored sweetly to her waist, prim as Mary Poppins with an over-bright, hideous scarf now slung around her neck.

Freder seemed to like her, but it was hard to determine his reactions as positive or negative.

“But you’re with a different grown-up this time,” she observed, in a somewhat loaded tone, as though in the dusk this kid was going to declare himself stolen and she was going to call the cops.

“Godparent,” Kylo explained, not sure what was the identification required to convince her.

She finally looked at him. Not the child who was repeatedly putting his pudgy fingers on the stone, then those same fingers into his mouth, then the mouth-fingers back onto the stone.

Her gaze sharp, quizzical, intelligent. Not as clownish as her reading face; which was malleable as clay.

“You should probably not let him do that.”

“If I pull him away, he screams.”

They both watched Freder and his filthy hands in silence, the chaos of the traffic below the library steps drowning out any demand to fill it.

“You come here often?” he found himself adding, because the lights from inside the library warmed her image enough that the garish clothing wasn’t so awful. It wasn’t even that she dressed badly; she accessorized poorly, whimsically, so the dark that stripped away the details made him able to enjoy her more.

“I read three days a week,” she crossed her arms over her chest, laden with both children’s and grown-ups books that snuggled into her coat.

He wanted to hear all of them; a bizarre and fixed impulse.

“You have a...really lovely knack for it.”

She smiled. “Thanks. It’s some of my fondest memories of the last couple of years. Funny little kids, seeing how these stories impact them on such an emotional level. It’s therapeutic.”

It felt the same for him.

He lowered Freder to the steps, a long string of spit connecting the toddler’s mouth to the stone, grasping his hood again to be able to shake her hand with the one that freed.

“I go by Kylo, by the way.”

Again, she looked suspicious. 

“Freder called you Uncle Ben.”

So she had been watching this closely. Her protective instincts…

She was really there to chew him out.

“Chosen name of Kylo Ren,” he insisted with a wolfish smile.

The Reader gave him another quizzical stare.

“My dad gives me pop tarts,” Freder said, interrupting a tense moment, and she raised her eyebrows to glance down at him.

“How nice, Freder. What kind?”

“Mhmm,” Freder responded, like a liar not wishing to be further questioned about this topic.

Kylo could not confirm or deny this information, so both adults watched him try to writhe free of Kylo’s grasp on his hand, which would result in him collapsing onto a stone step beneath himself.

Unsuccessfully. He instead dangled and spun like a Christmas tree ornament. 

“I’m Rey,” she said abruptly to Kylo.

Like she wanted him to know.

That felt amazing; even while Freder was using Kylo’s grip on his jacket to suspend himself from the edge of the step, singing to himself. Almost perpendicular to the step below him.

He was probably safer doing that than anything else on his own free will. 

“You like volunteering here?”

She nodded with a firm confidence.

“It’s a nice energy. I feel like everyone in the city is very lonely lately.”

There was a pregnant pause in the blaring of a taxi horn.

“Are you?”

Her eyes flickered.

Rey had a sweet face, illuminated by warm exterior light. There was something about her that was odd, and funny, and real; and shy of telling her outright he didn't really know how to explain just how drawn he felt to her.

“I’m too busy to feel lonely,” she admitted. "School and work and the rest."

He softened his lips into what he hoped looked like a smile.

“Me too. I sometimes wonder what will happen if that ever stops.”

But it felt a lie, and rested flatly between them. Freder gurgled between them; ambient sound that was too noisy without words. So he just kept talking:

“I enjoyed the opportunity to meet you, Rey.”

Making a great point in looking like he hadn't been lying when he just said he wasn’t lonely.

“Likewise,” she nodded to herself, narrowing her perceptive hazel eyes.

“What was that last line?”

She raised her eyebrows at him, confused.

He cleared his throat. It was a warmth he wanted to submerge himself in once more. “Of Ferdinand.”

She let a small snort out of her nose.

But she tucked her chin primly and obediently repeated it back to him anyway, from memory.

He repressed a shudder of pleasure, Freder dangling from his hand, as she walked down the steps, securing headphones into her ears as the winter twilight swallowed her.

He tried a lot of things.

Kylo Ren wasn't going to sleep until this was controlled. He couldn't sleep until he felt like he could control it.

He was a completist: if there was a way to satisfy this itch without going to her and her ugly shoes he would find it first. Before degrading himself by asking what he didn’t even know how to phrase yet.

What did he need?

Just quietly echoed through his skull. He had to suppress a shudder every time it hit him, his eyes snapping shut at all times during the day and night.

He lay awake trying to conjure her voice back, but it was like she was speaking through cotton, always melting away, the memory fading. And her threatening constantly, gone, gone, like she was never there at all.

Just quietly.

He needed that.

For someone else’s voice to fill his mind the way the lingering effects of hers had. A way to bottle that feeling, have a dosage of it, to clamber on top of the source of the voice and feel guided home by the tale.

He had, against all odds, felt connected to her reading.

It wasn’t to him; it was to children, and the children part of it was completely accidental and the first element he would like to leave at the door before going forward. It was about cadence. Clarity. Diction.

Emotion that made his heartbeat shallow.

She read like she was trying to coax an empathetic connection to a protagonist, in this case, a bull.

A bull who liked to smell flowers instead of mauling, or considering Kylo’s personal familiarity with bulls: charging down Wall Street.

Was the act of being read to sensual? He didn't know. He didn't know if he was perverting something meant for children, but he liked the image of it translating to adulthood: fresh out of a shower, pajamas on and in his king-size bed, Rey in a slip and those shoes that looked like barges far away while she stretched out and soothed him to sleep. Her soft-looking hair, the way she had prematurely laughed at lines that she hadn't read aloud yet, the wrinkle of her nose. 

And her voice with utter clarity. 

His fist wrapped around his cock sought her voice to guide him through it. But he wasn't as good at being malleable with it as she was. He couldn't twist it to say what he wanted her to say. 

So he was masturbating to his own sense of longing, all of his muscles chorded, a brush of a small hand like hers would have sent him irreparably over the edge. 

After a while he would take her with the shoes, buy her a mountain of them; it wasn't about Rey in just a slip in his bed at all. 

He just wanted to hear her voice.

He tried the obvious contenders for the same satisfaction; audiobooks.

Some with the intention of being dirty.

Those lost him immediately. Erotic novels with breathy voice actors. He hated the artifice of arousal, the text was garbage underneath it.

Next he searched for equally compelling voices. As though casting the role as intimate as the voice in his own goddamn head, he downloaded thousands of samples, shot the storage data remaining on his phone to hell and back, and doubled the length of his work-outs. Just trying to settle into the same rhythm that had come so naturally in the library. That eerie state of calm, like her voice was guiding him through the darkness.

A quirky, hipster-glasses intern who was responsible for getting coffee and managing social media, Kaydel, had once spent far too long talking to his secretary about ASMR videos consisting of her upcoming evening plans. Even after he scolded them for wasting valuable time, Kylo ended up spending his evening the same way; just frustrated instead of soothed. They weren’t hitting that sweet spot; he didn’t know what that sweet spot was, just that he had one, it had been hit before, and everything else fell short.

In his deepest desperation; he tried less chaste methods to satisfy the need to listen.

His industry made for such a place that no one was stranger to paying someone to handle the things you can’t speak about aloud.

A few business lunches had black, illuminated business cards pressed into his palm with a smug business smile.

For anything you may need.

“This isn’t some girl you pay to smile and nod, she went to Harvard, has immense customer satisfaction,” Canady had highly recommended the escort: “you will not be disappointed.”

The first thing she told him over the phone was that he would have to wait.

And the way she aptly maneuvered that call promised it would be worth it.

Kylo had picked out a few books in the weeks preceding the appointment, planned their meeting at a hotel room, and was pleased to hear her voice on the phone.

A naturally low, breezier version of East Coast chill.

He immediately got why her waiting list was so lengthy when she arrived. Gorgeous. Dressed like a vamp, but not obviously. A black-clad figure in the right shape didn’t need to be anything more than it was.

She was highly intelligent. Her rate made the hour...an investment.

And not a complete failure.

She propped open a book on her knee while he paced the room, uneasy.

“Is it strange…”

She was sharp enough to sense his reluctance. Seasoned in comforting taboos. Her eyebrows raised slightly, looking over the first few pages of the text he selected. She had requested a moment to read it over for preparation.

He appreciated a consummate professional and a minute to breathe, even if he was paying for it.

Her smile was not warm but intentionally approving: her hand over his in a gesture of comfort implied safety. Kylo hadn’t been touched in a long time. He had gone to the best person for this; closely researched, highly recommended. But the act of paying an escort to read to him made him feel like a flailing, inexperienced little boy or trapped in some psychosexual stage of development he would never be able to escape.

“You would not believe how many clients do not want to have sex with me during our time together,” she said it like it was no great insult, “Some people just want to meet for other needs. It’s alright.”

He uncorked the wine he had ordered to the room. They shared a glass or two as she read out loud to him. Trying to make this work.

She worked the casualness, the intimacy, into the words very easily. She might as well have been a king’s mistress soothing him off to sleep. At a certain point, he urged her over to the edge of the bed.

There he crawled behind her and pressed his nose to her hair as she read the words. Touched her. Cupped her breasts.

Easier, with her clothes still on. His skin still felt too cold.

Everything was read crisply and softly. She wavered when she should waver, as though in pleasure, continued on as though he wasn’t there when it felt right.

He grabbed the back of her dress in his fist.

“Say ‘just quietly,’ ” he ordered in a gruff bark.

She mimicked the cadence he had given her; specific, observant.

He got so frustrated, like he was coming so close to what he needed that he was at his angriest for not having it yet. Eventually, he took the book from her hands and rolled her onto her stomach to do the next step he had anticipated: just not like this.

He kept her dress on. Grunted with frustration through angry, intense thrusts that she took with a generously feigned enthusiasm. His hands were so tight on her hips he thought he was going to crack the bones into pieces.

She let him call her “Rey.”

Like he was praying, ducked his face in her shoulder blades like trembling little wings, kissing like she was the one he wanted underneath him.

Reading to him.

He had thought this would help. It was just too off-flavor of what he needed.

She earned her very high rate.

It wasn’t her fault.

It just wasn’t her.

He hadn’t seen Rey disassemble herself from the reader the last time. Freder had dragged him out to meet the lions the first visit: but his second he saw her audience tried to hold her captive in the same way she had held them for the past hour.

She didn’t only recognize Freder the night they met just because he was a weird kid who stuck out: kids clung to her when the three books were done. They demanded her attention, and she was a graceful as a birthday-party-princess in making them all feel special. Stepped all over her ugly shoes. She had toddlers hanging from her skirt, parents yammering at her about reading comprehension to get a jump on those ACT scores, the entire room wanted pieces of her that she sunk modestly behind a polite smile and just let them take.

He, selfish man, wanted to take more.

And give more back.

He had to wait a decent amount of time for her attention.

It was like she was coming out of just as much of a dream as he was.

She went to the children’s desk and asked the librarian there about her reserves for next week.

Elbows on the counter like a regular at a bar waiting for her usual.

“You came back,” she turned to him, hidden in the shelves, her expression dry.

He stepped uncomfortably along the eye-level clearing in the books. Not hidden. Terribly concealing his secret.

He was still a little wound up, mentally, not physically, from her voice.

And Rey chastising him like a little boy.

For hiding? For being there in the first place?

But clearly he was busted, and emerged, and watched the plastic-covered books slide across the desk into her waiting hands.

She lowered them into her printed tote bag.

Kitschy, too-colorful, distracting: she needed a brown leather messenger. Sleek and erudite.

It added automatically to his mental to-do list.

“But no kid with you this time,” she continued, tilting her head at him quizzically. Always quizzically. “Which kind of freaks me out.”

“Do you…” he took a deep breath through his nose.

She had read Ferdinand again: he was learning through the children’s cult-like attachment to the story that she always began her readings with it.

Just quietly, he remembered, just quietly.

Hearing it again had made him feel bullish and awkward.

Rey was the flower.

“Can you be hired to do readings?”

She looked surprised. Her eyebrows raised.

“I’m...no one’s offered to pay me for that. For events? Parties? It’s hardly a magician act, I don’t know how well it would go over-”

“Hear me out,” he said clumsily.

She looked dubious again. Immediately.

“It’s not for children…” she surmised, following the way his gaze lowered to the carpeted floor.

They were whispering. It was a library.

Kylo wanted to die in the silence she let hang between them. It was less humiliating to hire a prostitute for story time than to ask a woman he didn’t even want to have sex with to read to him.

He didn't expect her answer. Just a swift rejection, but he had to know he had tried everything.

“You are so lucky that I happen to need money,” she told him finally. “You may buy me a coffee. At least I’m sure this will make for a good story.”

“If I’m going to do this, I want to know exactly what I’m getting into.”

She was clutching her cup like this was in fact, as he had tried a million to assure her it was not, a sexual transaction.

He took a mistimed sip, lowering the mug when her own worries caused the furrow between her brows to deepen like a rockslide occurred somewhere over her nose.

“There will be no touching," he insisted firsthand, "No nudity. No sexual contact of any kind.”

She nodded briskly. “Alright. But you’ll be…?”

He drew up a blank, blinking at her.

“I honestly don’t know. But I won’t touch you, or make you...a part of it.”

“That’s fine,” she nodded again, nervously. “I mean, I don’t know if it’s fine. I’d rather not know if anything...happens after I leave. I’d rather not know at all.”

That was plenty fair. He hadn’t wanted to tell her about how often he pulled her voice in singular words into his head; even now he was storing up like a psychopath every murmur, musicality, and monotone.

“I don’t know yet if this is about arousal; but I wouldn’t want to make you uncomfortable,” he insisted, staring at his hands as his throat went dry.

She lowered her head into her hand for a second. Rubbing a crease out of her brow. Her voice was anxious when it came out.

“Were you hard in a public library?”

“Rey, no,” he squeezed his eyes shut after glancing frantically around the coffee shop to see if anyone was listening. “Fuck no. I just felt...awake. Comforted. By you. I wouldn’t have you read children’s books to me, it’s not about Peter Pan Syndrome or an underlying trauma involving my mother or a predatory older woman. It’s just you.”

The flattery sailed as flatly and unimpressively as a paper airplane. Like a teacher in a classroom, she probably found it inappropriate and distracting, scooped it up and promptly threw it away.

She clutched the tea in her hands. Lemon and honey, she explained when they sat down, helped with soothing her voice after projecting to all those people.

He loved her quieter, gentler voice. The intimate soft rasp.

“You talk about this like you don’t know what this is between us.”

He nodded desperately. “I don’t. Truly.”

“I think that’s the important thing,” she shrugged. “If you were prowling around libraries with this offer in hand, prepared, I’d be scared. To be honest, I still am. But you’re...figuring this out?”

“It wasn’t until you. I haven’t slept since I heard your voice,” he admitted.

That seemed to hit her harder than he had anticipated. 

"I'm a wicked insomniac," she said softly, looking at her saucer.

He couldn't meet the sadness in her eyes.

"Me too."

It was that simple. The poor thing decided then to help him.

Rey was persuaded but not convinced.

“First thing: I’m going to need to set down some boundaries.”

She came a week later. He told her to pick the book; under the guidelines that it was not one for children, not one that was explicitly sexual either.

The control.

This would be so much easier if this was about sex: but he didn’t know what it was. He just needed...whatever it was he couldn’t articulate when he listened to her voice.

“Well,” she stepped into the entryway. She, like many women in New York City, wore sneakers with all matters of her dress. Again with the white Adidas, a sweater over the button-up dress looking as vintage as one could be, gave the odd anachronistic image to her that made the perfectionist in him itch for a moment.

Almost an old-lady affect.

“I’ll have you know no less than seven people know I am here and are waiting for my confirmation that I’ve returned home alive tonight.”

He closed the door behind her just the same.

He didn’t know if he knew seven people from which he could ask the same, in her position.

“Is that your weapon?”

She looked down at the small, potted cactus in her gloved hand.

“I was taught to never enter a home for the first time without bringing something.”

“Good of you,” he cupped two open hands where she deposited the small plant. It was in a nice stone pot, heavy, a neat size and shape like a Japanese teacup.

Cool to the touch in some places, warm from where her fingers had curled around it.

He looked warily down at the little living thing.

“What happens if I kill it?”

She was unimpressed with his objection.

“Hard to kill. That’s why they make such good gifts.”

“I could still manage. Shoes off,” he added crisply, setting down to cactus on is kitchen counter.

He didn’t have a strong stance on shoes on or off in his apartment. A cleaning lady came once a week: there was not a lot of traffic motivating a need for her to be there more often. He’d just do anything to get those ugly sneakers off.

Rey made a face, but lifted one foot behind her and slipped the sneaker off by the heel.

"Do you want a drink?"

He was having one. His hands were shaking. 

"It's best if I don't, other than water," she added clumsily on to her refusal, remembering she would be reading for an hour.

He fetched her a glass and then led her to an armchair in his living room.

He sat, wide-stanced, on his couch and picked up the drink he had halved in the time spent waiting for her arrival.

This was a paid service just like anything else. He compared it to Reiki Massage, in their many hours of back-and-forth negotiation. House sitting. Therapy.

She still watched him carefully until he looked her in the eyes, instead of at the coffee table.

Rey had given him very little information about herself; perhaps for her comfort.

She was in Graduate School. Refused to name the institution. Was an English major, which made for her volunteering at the Library a happy and comfortable part of her life.

She had a night class on Wednesdays. She actually didn’t mind coming over later if it meant she could stop at his place on the commute home. The time worked for him.

It was odd; he had never been is such constant communication with someone as he had been for her. Talking about boundaries. Talking about the task he needed her to fulfill. It was just reading, but he was a man with issues and too much money, so it was never as simple as putting a book in her hands and giving her a fat 100-dollar-bill for her efforts.

“Please, be comfortable,” he pleaded quietly, as she was sensing his own anxiety and together they were spiraling.

He could not calm down until she did, and she wasn’t calm because he wasn’t.

Rey startled to life. Understanding.

She kicked up her socked feet onto the chair, curling up like she was reading in her own apartment. The book spread open on her lap.

“I figured I would start with some Plath: if you can manage to be aroused by that I will think you’re a serial killer.”

He did manage a laugh at that. The polar opposite of Ferdinand the Bull. 

She licked her lips and it was like being enchanted.

"’It was a queer, sultry summer…’”

He closed his eyes. Even in November, he believed it. Summer melted from her voice.

He leaned back in his seat, spine relaxing, and closed his eyes as he listened to her.

Maybe this was a verbal thing.

“‘...the summer they electrocuted the Rosenbergs, and I didn't know what I was doing in New York.’"

But when his eyes flickered up and she was still there: it was clear that it was all within her, and it was all within her being here with him.

Whatever the fuck he needed from this strange arrangement.

When he trailed her to the door like a lost puppy when the hour was up: she seemed to feel more confidence in the scenario, even with him at her heels with a somewhat desperate pace.

“That wasn’t too weird?” he showed the first vulnerable insecurity, instead of riling like a man trying to get out of questions, “You weren’t uncomfortable?”

“It was fine,” she half-smiled at him. Clearly not getting out of this what he did, but understanding and maybe kinder than the average person would be. “Go to sleep, Kylo.”

But she would come back.

Chapter Text

The readings had set rules every time.

The obvious was no touching.

An unspoken, for the first, was his hands were held sort of defensively in plain sight, where she could see them. 

Rey, used to a misbehaving audience, monitored him closely in the beginning. 

"I asked your doorman if there were any secret, misappropriated panic rooms in your apartment," she told him once, taking a slow drink of water. He actually laughed at that. She was funny, when she gave him even an inch of her true self to look at. 

The first several were done in his living room, a sort of Fireside Chat, where she narrated comfortably aloud from the book left open in her lap. It was less animated than her performances for children, more soothing.

She seemed to take a lot from his insomnia explanation: she knew she was reading him to bed and it was something he was much too shy to articulate.

He didn’t care much about subject matter, she didn’t have to finish the story that night or ever. They didn’t discuss the text; it wasn’t like a book club, or even one of those oddly Victorian arrangements where she had to provide ample conversation to a lonely benefactor.

He usually, calmly, went to sleep afterwards.

He got an hour of Tolstoy, of Plath, when she was feeling punchy she got him up to Mr. Oak’s botched proposal in Far From the Madding Crowd.

Once as a test they tried an instruction manual from one of the remotes in his coffee table drawers. It wasn't riveting, but he'd listen to it again.

He would pay her for her time and services: but all gifts were to be in cash. He tried to tip her in the form of that leather messenger bag and she soured immediately.

Put her foot down about that with a withering glare.

Something about him picking things out for her bothered her immensely. If he meant to express these things, gratitude, appreciation mostly: cash would do it. She needed that more than a bag, but how much, she refused to tell him.

“A gift is a suggestion,” she said once when he tried to pry at what she’d like more out of their transaction: a purse, jewelry, tickets to a show? “A man buying you a book is telling you that the book must speak to you in the same way as it did him. I don’t need to be elevated. I don’t care if you don’t like how I dress.”

So he didn’t hide it as well as he had thought.

He didn’t actually hate her dresses.

Just those fucking shoes.

“What if it’s something you want?”

She was sliding a copy of The Secret History back into her tote bag.

A pitch-perfect selection in his eyes. Lovely prose. Not a fucking care in the world what happened to those people.

“That’s for me to decide what to spend the cash on. Maybe my needs are a little more important than wants at this point in my life.”

So instead he tipped generously. Nothing really felt like enough, but her nature wouldn’t accept anything that felt like he was trying to get anything else out of her.

Determining an hourly rate was one thing they both struggled with, in the beginning. How much was too high? She seemed to be more sensitive to where that line was than he was.

There was a practice in high-end sushi restaurants called Omakase that he sent her articles about: the chef determined the tasting menu depending on the day and while most meals came at a fixed price, the consumer could sometimes pay what seemed to appropriately honor the experience from the chef.

Determining price between them seemed the same kind of intimate with the same fear of insulting.

The rough translation of the term Omakase meant “I’ll leave it up to you” or “to entrust.”

They did not touch. The boundary there was clear. Apart from a handshake when they first met for coffee, it seemed safer to go without.

Kept him saner to go without. He still shook apart sometimes, thinking on her voice, now with a familiar reserve for it. But arousal was more complicated, more forbidden, because she was around so much. She was Rey now. It felt like a violation. Even if this was what he sought her out for, even if she gave him the go-ahead, with his discretion, to leave her out of it. He still felt that aching longing, but she was there, so close, that it didn't feel like this psychosexual fantasy.

He hadn’t been with anyone since the night with the escort, and he was too jittery that night just because he knew he was breaking a dry spell of a few years.

He wasn’t sure when he had forgotten to remember to seek human contact; but it had to have been a long time. With him fucking that woman with her dress still on, belly-down on the bed, quivering and a mess above her: he had been reminded.

It had been awhile since anyone touched him.

Was he strange, or odd? Wall Street introduced him to more drugs and more access to anything that could sate a craving you didn’t know you had, but that was when he was in his twenties, stupid, seeking relief from whatever made his brain such an unpleasant place. To exercise control of himself, he phased those things out of his life, enjoyed in moderation, left up to the occasional impulse or response to opportunity.

Rey was indifferent; she assumed his touch was experienced by others, or not at all, never. That he wasn't going through some strange crisis phase. This was just who he was to her. What mattered to her was that he didn’t touch her; and he didn’t.

That was a rule.

His family was all but marooned in his old, forgotten sentiments. He hadn’t spoken to his parents in years. Poe and Finn hedged his obligation to be in their lives, but he squirmed past the huggy stuff with ease.

Ironically, there was no one in his life who noticed but Freder.

“You don’t hold my hand,” Freder snapped at him at a crosswalk. Kylo looked down at the three-year-old; obligated to baby-sit for a reason that Poe made sound like an emergency but ended up just being a trick. Poe was crafty.

The kid’s hood was in his fist again. It looked aggressive. It felt aggressive. And Kylo could see the child-logic in it.

Adults in charge were supposed to hold your hand near the street.

And those creepy eyes looked hurt that Kylo wouldn’t want to hold his hand. How crushing that felt as a small child when someone next to you protested the instruction because it was your own hand. A simplistic hurt; so human it made Kylo hurt for a minute too. With guilt. With shame.

“Sorry, Freder,” he found himself existentially brought to his knees. He saw himself as the kid saw him. The weird Uncle Ben who wasn’t married, had no partner, and paid a woman to read to him three nights out of the week as his only emotional outlet.

Not that Freder knew about that; but the massiveness of his own shame was drowning him while Freder dangled from his own little sweatshirt hood.

Freder took his hand. Solving the problem. And it was about as pleasant as he pictured when he decided to go for the hood instead. Sticky. Way too warm in the Winter chill.

Kylo swallowed and led them into the bakery across the street for a treat. It wasn’t Pop Tarts. But having his hand held and eating a cookie the size of his face seemed to satisfy the bug-eyed one enough for an afternoon.

He laid down on the couch that night. This was the first time he wasn’t fully upright, in his work clothes, drinking like he was meeting a friend at a bar.

She seemed a little unnerved, for him and not herself, to see him lie down.

“Alright?” she interrupted her sentence to check, but he waved her off. So she kept leading their way through Rebecca.

“‘I wondered how many people there were in the world who suffered, and continued to suffer, because they could not break out from their own web of shyness and reserve, and in their blindness and folly built up a great distorted wall in front of them that hid the truth.’”

Right through the fucking heart.

Was she choosing these from some passive-aggressive theme? Or was he being paranoid?

He scrubbed a hand over his face. Instead of not sleeping, he now felt like he was always sleepwalking. He was a constant mess. 

When the hour was up, she collected her bag and picked up her water glass to put away in the sink. Always leaving no trace.

Maybe paranoid that he’d use any physical evidence to her being there to...

“I’m checking if you killed my cactus.”

She bent her head to peer down at it.

“Was I supposed to water it?”

“It’s still a plant.”

“It lives in a desert.”

“It lives on your kitchen counter,” she filled her glass from the Brita on the counter and wet the soil in the pot.

“And it’s not ‘your cactus’ you gave it to me.”

She glanced up at him.

“You’re right. The cactus is out of my hands.”

She said, while watering it.

He watched from the doorway. This cold space wasn’t used to women lingering when they were present, much less one with a presence like hers.

“I could hire you to water the plants, if you’d like further employment.”

She snorted. “I’m sure a few people have tried to use you to climb some corporate ladder, but I don’t think watering your plants is a resume booster.”

“Excuse to get you to come around more,” he shrugged, as though to offset his sincerity in the offer, and felt stupid.

“Kylo,” she considered him quietly. The stone flower pot thunked against the stone countertop when she set it down

He felt odd about this. Odd about himself.

She never lingered. She was a voice to him, a meditative guide, but this evening when he sagged into the couch like he was going to fall asleep...

She looked worried.

“You just seem...alone,” she was very quiet as she spoke. Not looking at him. “As far away as possible from me, and that’s not just Rebecca, is it? You’re Maxim, a little bit, quite gothic and chilly.”

So she was tailoring these at least a little.

He didn’t know what to say, what of himself to give, so he only said:

“A lunch to renegotiate?”

He didn’t know what he wanted. He’d think of it before then. He was too tired now.

She licked her lips. She was always parched; having to speak so much in the silence he needed filled. He went to the fridge to get her a bottled water.

“My terms,” her voice fluttered like a little moth.

He went still.

Listening, as always.

“I’m...doing a paper on Angela Carter. I want to read from The Bloody Chamber.”

He nodded, “You can always choose-”

“There’s sex,” she looked at him, pregnant with meaning.

They had skirted around the issue of arousal. The books, while containing sexuality, were bookmarked to her choosing and skimmed any mention of carnal desire. She left, if he needed to touch himself to her memory, to the rare time he coaxed a recording out of her for later, before it had to be known to her.

It wasn’t the same as having her here.

She lobbed this out awkwardly. Initiating the subject. You will hear me speak of sex, of desire, and that barrier between us may lift.

Lunch to discuss the terms if that happened.

She put her shoes back on. Grimacing at him as she struggled to get the heel over one foot, the back of the shoe folding and getting in the way.

“If I wore six-inch stilettos, you wouldn’t make me take my shoes off.”

He tried not to picture it.

That little wrinkle across her nose when he blinked innocently at her was adorable.

“You’re right,” he said sheepishly, “if you wore six-inch stilettos, I would have no problem with it at all.”

Rey gave him a dry look. Withering, if he wasn’t getting used to her abrupt sense of humor.

She shook his hand before leaving; her touch lingering like a burn.

“At once he closed my legs like a book and I saw again the rare movement of his lips that meant he smiled.
‘Not yet. Later. Anticipation is the greater part of pleasure, my little love.’”

Rey’s eyes flickered up to him.

“How are you-”

He grit his teeth.

“Please don’t interrupt.”

It was getting good. But he was also white-knuckling any self control he had to not be hard right now. 

But Rey knew what she had just read. With a slow swallow, a single chug of water, she stood up.

Stopping short was as brutal as the contents of The Bloody Chamber.

He almost berated her. The hour wasn’t up. She couldn’t stop yet.

She knew he was keeping himself under a tight leash for her. That this was a lot. Teasing. Tempting. He kept waiting for her to hurl her book at him.

He was ready to beg, to unfurl his wallet, to sell his goddamn soul.

But she extended a hand to him.

Led him to his own damn bedroom.

“On the bed,” she said without much ceremony. He felt awkward, fully dressed, a glass of whiskey waiting to be finished on his coffee table that he should clean up and a few emails he should answer before entering his bed.

She had her text cradled to her chest like a spellbook.

There was an armchair in his bedroom, where he would often take international calls in the morning. She dragged it forth and settled in.

This would break the seal on his private space: they would never read in the living room again.

“Then he kissed me. And with, this time, no reticence. He kissed me and laid his hand imperatively upon my breast, beneath the sheath of ancient lace. I stumbled on the winding stair that led to the bedroom, to the carved, gilded bed on which he had been conceived. I stammered foolishly: We've not taken luncheon yet; and, besides, it is broad daylight…

‘All the better to see you.’”

He stared at the ceiling, tried to calm his own breath, but Rey soldiered on without mercy and he would hear this story to its end.

They long surpassed the hour.

“And, in the red firelight, I blushed again, unnoticed, to think he might have chosen me because, in my innocence, he sensed a rare talent for corruption.”

He should have gotten out of bed to walk her out when it was over, but she was over him, brushing his hair off his brow and he didn’t dare move. He shivered into her tentative touch.

They didn’t do this. They agreed.

He was dangerously close to sleep, and if sleep was a way to obey her voice, he’d seek it with his clothes on, over the sheets, wanting to please her.

That was his last, fleeting desire, and he woke the next morning in his clothes, on top of the covers, and with her gone.

“I was wondering,” Rey’s voice, another call between them, cut through a mindless day of business lunches and buttering up people that he hated just for the sake of money, “if you’ve ever looked into a professional cuddler.”

“I…”

That could not be a real thing.

“They’re a real thing,” she seemed to read his mind. “I’m forwarding you some information on them. I mean, I know that we have a professional boundary, maybe it wouldn’t be good to cross-”

“Rey,” he said finally, looking at the lengthy selection from his email that she had researched for him. “You didn’t have to.”

He heard her swallow. “I just think...I know what our terms are. Maybe if you’re looking for anything else, though.”

“I can’t have that from you?”

She was quiet a moment.

“Do you want that from me?”

He sighed.

“Coffee, so you know what you’re getting into?”

She hummed, contemplating. “Sure.”

It was bizarre because she brought it up. She was so swift to turn down anything she didn't like.

Rey brought it up, and let it be her. 

She draped him, first, across her lap, and propped the corner of the book up on his massive arm to read.

The videos on professional cuddlers made it look like a kind of massage, and that was exactly what her hand did to his head when it wasn’t turning a page. Petting him.

He felt foolish, her coddled child, in her arms; but her cool hands stroked through his hair and her voice from above him was so perfect, beating down on him like a sheet of rain, that he was limp as a sleepy kitten within a few paragraphs.

Was it his own loneliness that told him it felt like she was touching him because she wanted to?

It helped that Puss-in-Boots, Angela Carter’s version at least, was delectably silly and naughty and the way that Rey read it had so much of her pre-existing affection he felt like this was as much for her as it was for him.

They had found a rhythm with The Bloody Chamber. They finally finished the stories she was reading this way, the anthology making the readings episodic instead of vague and ethereal snippets of text.

And the text was the sweet spot.

Closer than anything else he, or they, had ever found.

She didn’t have to stay when the story is done. There wasn't a lot of aftercare needed for Puss-In-Boots.

"You like this power."

She snickered, her breath ruffling his hair as she pet him in her lap.

"It's a little funny. This big, powerful, scary businessman. Only I know your secrets."

No wonder this felt as much for her benefit as it was his. 

He grumbled against her knee instead of answering. A young woman playing a game with power; he was surprised she took so long to toy with it. 

But, as if tired herself, she slipped down and spooned behind him. Hugging him. Pressing herself into him with steady pressure. It still had a professional, massage-like, therapeutic vibe; but he’d take it.

Over the clothes was maybe as much as he could stand right now.

"I'll call you a cab."

"I can't pay for it," she murmured against his neck. Neither of them seemed ready to move.

"I'm paying for your cab," he growled, and she dared a laugh from behind him. 

"My eccentric billionaire," she stroked her fingers teasingly into his hair. 

He kept trying not to jerk in her arms at every new touch. But he did. And she soothed him through it each time.

"Don't be ridiculous. I'm only a millionaire."

"Does this help?" she squeezed closer, breathing slow while he shivered. 

Help what? He still didn't know himself.

He just felt better and didn't want it to stop.

"Yes," he put his hands over hers, "it does. Do you mind? If we do this? At the fee we discussed."

"Hmm," she snuggled closer, laughing to herself, "I think that would be nice."

They both fell asleep like that. At about three in the morning, he felt her move behind him, rousing from their odd slumber. She was stumbling around the room, still fully lit by the beside lamp and the hallway lights, piecing herself back together. 

They hadn't meant to. But it happened.

“You don’t have to…” she licked her dry lips, “you don’t have to pay me for the time I was asleep.”

She looked lost, waking up with him, in his room. Reminding him that maybe this odd arrangement still scared her. 

That he was always pitching this carefully because there was something wrong with him.

“Rey.”

“I’m sorry.”

“No,” he reached for her, “I want to. It’s your time.”

“It was time I chose to give you,” she said sadly, and it was clear then that he had failed some kind of test.

Chapter Text

"Although her father had told her of the nature of the one who waited for her, she could not control an instinctual shudder of fear when she saw him, for a lion is a lion and a man is a man and, though lions are more beautiful by far than we are, yet they belong to a different order of beauty and, besides, they have no respect for us: why should they?

Yet wild things have a far more rational fear of us than is ours of them, and some kind of sadness in his agate eyes, that looked almost blind, as if sick of sight, moved her heart."

Angela Carter, 'The Courtship of Mr. Lyon'

Rey had midterms.

Rey had midterms, and he had failed her in some crucial way, and there was no amount of coaxing that could make her come back this week.

He didn’t sleep at all. Instead he ran the thing he had said that failed her test over and over in his head to try to reverse-engineer the test out of the wrong answer.

Considering the restfulness of their spooning bodies in his bed, his last sleep may have been for a thousand years, but without her alongside him or even cracking a book for his enjoyment was making his hands start to twitch.

He wanted to offer more. More money. More power. more of himself.

Anything she wanted.

But what was that offer but a dragon locking her away forever for his own selfish wants.

He didn’t know how to slip back into her focus. She would answer calls in a level voice and inform him of the lack of spare time she had, absently clicking a pen as she was studying whenever he rang her from his empty apartment.

There was no currency that he owned that could be used in exchange for her attention.

This made his muscles clench, his hair curl, his nails scratch up and down his thighs when she would turn down the request for a half hour, even over the phone, to give him what he needed.

He was prowling his own space like a hunting ground; lacking in prey to catch. An agitated monster. 

He was a desperate man.

The solution to the problem came in two waves:

The first was in what she thought to give to him. Her gift. Her suggestion.

He had thought to hurl the cactus she gave him against the wall after his third rebuked offer for her to return that week. It had felt like the last of his chances was gone by then.

He drank stale-tasting water from his filtered jug and stared at the spiky thing alone in his kitchen.

He sighed and instead tentatively dipped a finger into the soil in the pot.

Dry. Dry as powder. 

He grimaced.

How dry was a cactus supposed to get? There was some little browning at the body--

A sharp pinch pulled his hand away as a spike caught his thumb.

His curse echoed against the white walls surrounding him.

Kylo’s apartment, somehow possible in a city of all these people, was completely silent.

He took out his phone.

Impulsively, he took a picture of the blood furling out of the cut like a rose petal. The cactus was in the background of the shot.

It bit me.

He was sending this to Rey without a second thought.

It took her a minute to answer. He saw her typing. He held his phone for too long, breathing heavily, while the ellipsis kept him waiting.

For good measure, he started to pour the rest of his glass of water into the soil.

She had no sympathy for his spilled blood:

The cactus looks a little dry.

He snorted incredulously. Her gift maimed him.

I just watered it. I promise.

It felt like saying good night. A soft cap on the conversation. An excuse to say goodbye.

But she was typing again:

Seems I can’t be gone a week without things falling to pieces.

He actually smiled, wiping the blood off on his expensive slacks just to be able to type more quickly.

This was actually from days ago. Now it has overgrown and filled my entire apartment; there’s thorns everywhere. It’s really made a mess of things. I will propose your usual rate if you hack through them for me.

Her response was swift:

Cactuses don’t have thorns. They have spines.

He closed his eyes and thought please.

I’m trapped.

A lump rose in his throat when he didn’t even see her type for long, silent minutes. She was a person. She could be in class. She could be studying. There were plenty of reasons-

It’ll die eventually if you stop watering it. No hacking required.

And then, again, another message from her:

I'm not feeling very valiant: do you really need my help?

His fingers speak for him.

It’s true. I need you.

He faltered the moment it was too late to take back; it had sent. So he muddied it with more words.

You wield a sword better than me. Rescue me.

He could hear her thinking as though in his own head. As though he sensed her ready to return.

I have exams.

His heart stopped its climb up his throat. Choking him swiftly.

He set his phone down on the counter. His cheeks burning.

His phone buzzes with one last message:

But I will be with you in a week. For your plant problem. You have my sword.

Freder was drooling on his couch.

He would let Freder continue drooling on his couch, if that would keep him occupied and only destroying one of the things in his apartment during the next six hours, but he wasn’t sure that would work.

Finn twisted something while at his climbing gym. Poe was with him, it wasn’t severe enough to get seen by a doctor right away, and then their babysitter flaked… Kylo wasn’t the one having the worst day in this mess (it was easy to tell Freder was a lot less happy with this hasty plan for his strange godparent to watch him) but he still wasn’t excited about this.

“Rey,” Kylo hissed through the phone. “You have to help me.”

She had to be outside, near traffic, it sounded like, her voice tired.

Things had shifted since the cactus conversation. Softened. Whatever test he had failed forgiven if not forgotten. They had scheduled her for Saturday, and as it was Thursday he was so close to seeing her again, but this was his breaking point even in such a delicate situation.

“Kylo, I just got out of an exam.”

Her gorgeous voice was so petulant with him; any employee who spoke to him like that would be fired on the spot.

From Rey he reveled in it.

He was undeterred.

“Your last one, I’m assuming?”

“Don’t you dare imply I’ve agreed to anything.”

She sighed, her phone muffled as it moved against her head.

“It’s not, actually. I have one more tomorrow morning.”

He swallowed nervously, Freder’s eyes boring into him.

“I know you’re not a babysitter, I’d just like...someone else keeping an eye on him. I’ll pay you. I’ll help you study.”

“By bringing a toddler into the mix. Marvelous.”

“I didn’t expect to be getting him today. It’s an emergency or I wouldn’t be calling. I just need someone to watch him a few hours with me, to help him get to sleep. Please.”

There was a long, slow sigh. He could feel her stop walking.

“You have to come to my place. And I have things that I need to get done today.”

She lived in a tower.

So did he, they all did, in this city.

But she could have warned him about the elevator. Or how it was broken.

He tried to crane his neck properly to perceive how bad twelve of those twisting flights was going to be. She buzzed him in with no apologies for her shitty building or the upcoming climb. He was certainly earning this favor.

Freder bounced on and off the first step of the twelve flights they would be taking up to her.

Up.

Down.

His shiny rain boots would flash every time he hopped on or off.

Up.

Down.

On the stairs. 

Off the stairs.

Kylo heaved a sigh.

There was little chance he would make it all the way up to her, let alone a toddler.

Gritting his jaw, he picked Freder up and settled him on his shoulders. Those little wet rain boots were going to ruin his shirt.

He began his ascent with the longing growing sharper with every step.

He had forgotten how to be a person without Rey. He was never a nice guy. He was charming enough to get strings pulled, to get meetings, to be the slick suit nobody actually liked for all these years.

But he was unbearable in the week she was too busy for him. Wasting sick days he never took before to sulk in his apartment after his assistant quit over his temper.

People in the office were ready to give him bereavement  time for his behavior. Assuming he was acting that way out of tragedy and not just agitation.

She actually made him wait at the door, out of breath, with Freder still on his shoulders. It felt like years since he had been at the bottom of the stairs. A better man, if still an awful one, before that monumental task.

Rey was unimpressed when she finally did open it. A cup of tea, steaming as though just poured, filling her hand.

“You escaped the mighty thorns.”

His mouth was too dry to quip back.

Freder made a noise like a squeak that constituted for a greeting: enough of one that Rey smiled up at him over Kylo's head.

“Hello, Freder.”

“Quite the saga to get here,” he finally rasped, annoyed she smiled at his godson but not him.

She took a slow sip from her tea. Piping hot, steaming curling into the loose strands of her hair. Flushing her face red from the brush of it. That piping hot.

Not even a flinch from those pretty lips though. She must have liked it that way.

“Ah, yes. The climb.”

She tapped her foot against the doorframe: clad in her trademark white barges.

Kylo was beginning to understand the need for the sneakers, living all the way up here. He was still not above glowering at them.

He had not missed those things.

He lowered the child and clambered into the tiny space.

“When’s that elevator getting fixed?”

“Don’t be grumpy,” she was crouched on a small navy rug in the square of floor that was a living room, gesturing Freder to pick up a small stuffed lion she had set out for him, “You’ll just have to be patient about that. It’s only been broken since Dinkins was in office.”

It would not do; her living like this. Not on his watch.

Kylo withdrew the small envelope that came to be associated with all the money he gave her; a tap against the back of her head to gain her attention. She didn’t look at him as she grabbed it from him and stuffed it in the back pocket of her pants.

It was troublesome that she clearly hated money so much; for he had nothing else to give her.

“Are you Uncle Ben’s wife?”

They both looked at Freder then. The lion was about his size, from where he was seated, and the way it rested beside him it looked like the amount of children had doubled. It mirrored his expectant look.

“Sadly, no,” Rey made a face like it was sad for her and Freder, “Even he can’t afford that.”

Kylo ran the numbers quickly. It wasn't impossible to afford, technically. Rey just was.

He found himself seated in one of her shapeless armchairs: choosing the one that looked the least like a bundled homeless person slumped against a brick wall.

But not by much.

Clutching the arms like he needed a drink. Slouching like a man with no respect for himself.

“Now that your uncle has chosen his throne,” she whispered dramatically to Freder, “there’s cookies in the kitchen for a little friend of mine.”

He could not hold back his sardonic tongue.

“She’s going to eat you, Freder.”

Freder was already toddling off, ignoring him.

There was a warm, friendly commotion in the kitchen. Freder was not a giggler, he expressed happiness in needless facts, so there was a deluge of gravely serious information about the neighbor's cat that Rey was treated to before they returned.

He was trying to rest off that hellish climb to meet her.

A warm cookie knocked against Kylo’s cheek, getting crumbs down his neck. He flinched away from it. With a growl, he pulled it out of her hand, but that meant he would now have to eat it.

He typically avoided sweets.

Rey was armed with Freder and the plate when she sat at his feet.

The plate rested on the coffee table. They all chewed quietly for a few minutes.

It was a good cookie.

“I’d like to take Freder to the Museum of Natural History,” Rey tilted her head back to look at him.

Freder was feasting like it was feeding time at the zoo, so he wasn’t as impressed at the offer as Kylo would have imagined.

He was also unmoved when he down looked at her. He didn't want to leave. He wanted to be here.

And he didn't want to have to do those stairs again.

“You have to study.”

She shook her head.

“It’s a literary final. I just have to write about a book over and over.”

“What book?”

“None of your business. You can’t have every written word that’s passed across my eyes.”

“I want them,” he muttered, and she stopped dancing the stuffed lion in front of Freder.

She twisted to look over her shoulder at him.

The silence that stretched could have killed him; so much more powerful than her gentle words.

They were very bad without a set script.

He cleared his throat.

“The museum, then.”

“That’s a big monster.”

Freder was walking between her feet through dinosaur bones. She lifted him by the hands when his pace lagged. They were both practicing some equally feral growling.

The black skeletons were awash in a cloudy gray light from the windows overhead. Kylo blinked up at their stark, twisting bones.

The three of them...it made sense in an odd way. It was strange only intimately. To strangers, Kylo surmised, they were just another couple with their child at the museum on an afternoon.

He wanted to pretend-

“I haven’t been here in a few years,” Rey admitted to him, her voice losing so much of that bright energy to speak like an adult. “I honestly wanted to come back.”

He found he liked that. The sense of rest in her voice, like she didn’t have to try so hard with him. It was intimate, like she was climbing into a bed they shared, just to sleep, the smell of fresh lotion and silk pajamas on her skin.

He closed his eyes tightly to dispel the thought.

“When was the last time a grad student needed to step into a children’s museum?”

“Hey,” she shot him a withering look, “I was here for a very adult party, I’ll have you know. A friend, a grad student, interned here, and she brought me to a few events. There were cocktails in the Gemstone Room, anyway, she brought me up here with our wine. It felt like the only way to see the dinosaurs.”

He could only pick apart detail by detail. Another woman. Wine.

“Are you a lesbian?”

“Kylo.”

“What? Freder has two fathers; he knows what a lesbian is.”

“That’s private,” she hissed, blushing.

He listened to her breath as they walked. Tried to take her in from the corner of his eye: her jeans, her pretty blue blouse, the shoes ballooning around her feet like she was going to float away on them...

“I’m not,” she sniffed finally, “not that it’s your business. I wanted to see a documentary screening they were hosting that night.”

He blinked at her.

It fluttered back to him. Cocktails in the Gemstone Room.

“The one about the Saint in Mexico?” he questioned in a low voice. “With the fire?”

It was a coincidence; there had to be hundreds of events in that room each year.

She went very still.

“Yes.”

“You were there?”

“You were there?”

“My company sponsored that screening.”

They were blinking at each other. Both open-mouthed. Freder gurgled against Rey’s knee; his dinosaur roar turning swiftly into a wolf howl.

Damn kid couldn’t keep anything straight in that curly head of his.

“Did we….?”

Her lids fall heavy over her eyes in thought. He did not remember meeting her.

He felt that he would remember. It was her.

“I don’t think so.”

“Hmm,” she regarded him carefully, “what are the chances.”

Her tone was careful. Revealing nothing. As though she was hiding that she was as spooked by this as he was.

“I don’t know,” he said finally.

They were both sobered by the almost-chance of them meeting before. As though they were not housed by the same island for years.

They focused intently on Freder for the rest of the evening. Dinner was a quiet affair, selected by Freder. The movie they watched on her small television was selected by Freder. The book she read.

And the lullaby she sang-

Which Kylo had to leave the room for.

Freder was in her bed. Not under the covers, she fetched a spare blanket as though her duvet would somehow absorb the toddler too intimately. Curious, looking for excuses to pry, Kylo paced around her small bedroom like a prowling lion just once before she made him stand in the doorway.

Saying he was making her nervous.

There was a bookshelf and a bed. That was about it.

He watched her on the edge of her own bed, Freder curled up, and sang in her soft, murmuring voice.

Kylo had to wrench himself away. Before it was too late. The book was a clean sort of intriguing; he could watch her and listen without shaming himself. Her song was different. It was obscene, the way he reacted. He could claim that parts of himself that went emotionally and psychologically malnourished were in no way sexual. But this need. The need for her. It was-

Too fucking much.

On that shitty armchair, her voice filling his ears, he was trying not to picture her slender fingers dancing across the bare skin of his back, his cock made home in her, her throat making such pretty noises. Like a siren calling a sailor. He was forever gone.

She closed the door to let Freder doze. They were waiting until Finn and Poe would arrive in their taxi to take the sleeping boy home.

Rey went to the kitchen to tidy up.

He crept closer. 

Half-mad with this...enchantment...

She sensed his wide berth of her. Circling, still, from a distance. She cleaned up her apartment. Put toys away that she somehow had laying around for Freder. Cleaned up dishes.

Sighed when he bent to sniff her hair.

“You are a strange man,” she closed her eyes, steam rising from the basin of the sink. Her hands were wet and pink from the dishes. “But you can never hide when you want me.”

He let his breath ghost down her neck.

“You are...a serious academic. And a shrewd negotiator. And a...Disney Princess, when you feel like it. You are everything that people need you to be.”

“What I need to be,” she corrected, focusing on drying a plate. “To survive.”

“And what is more useful than the person everyone needs,” he purred in her ear. “Then there is always a place for you in this world.”

He put his hands on her waist. The dish slipped from her grasp.

He spun her to face him. Pinned against her counter as the plate cracked into shards in the sink.

There were a million things he wanted to ask.

Should they have met before; that strange night where they were in the same place at the same time? Would that have made another life for him; if he’d heard his voice before he felt too broken to have anything else?

Would he give this up; to have had a normal shot with her? To never know what her reading voice did to him?

To lose this madness?

Someone once told him, he couldn’t think of who, that at the center of every fig there was once a dead wasp. Figs were actually flower pods that were inverted, they couldn’t be pollinated without a bug venturing in to meet its maker by becoming trapped inside. It’s what made it into what it was.

You couldn’t have a fig without a wasp dying on the inside of the flower. Sweet flesh made by sacrifice.

He felt like the wasp in the midst of her beautiful potential. Fated to stay trapped in this to make something better.

It felt like it had to be this way, and it broke him.

Rey’s head fell back slightly at the look in his eyes. Her own eyes were weary.

“Will you,” he felt like he was choking on everything in the world he could possibly want. Because it was just this. “Will you sing to me?”

He had never felt so vulnerable. Because he knew, unlike last time, this was not something he could pay for.

She straightened her chin like she did every time she knew that she could name her price.

Rey pressed her lips to his cheek.

“If you’re very good for me; I’ll sing.”

He nodded.

“But you were very cranky and difficult today.”

There was a growl in the back of his throat. He had just agreed, and this much of the day was true.

“Yes, Rey.”

“But if you do these dishes for me, you may have a story tonight.”

He moaned, pressing his face into her neck.

She patted him gently on the back.

And she flinched as he obediently thrust his hands into the hot water behind her, as though to show her that he was going to be good for her.

Rey stumbled out from under his arm, retrieving her book from a tote bag on the counter. There was a stool on the other side, where she took up her seat, watching him with suds coming up to his elbow.

He was carefully picking the shards of the pink plate out of the water and placing them on a dishtowel.

“I’ll replace it,” he told her crisply, and she wet her lips with an incredulous expression.

He tried to suppress the shudder when she opened her book. Rey licked her thumb before paging through:

“And yet The Beast goes always masked; it cannot be his face that looks like mine.”

Kylo let his shoulders relax as she moved through the story.

“'You may put me in a windowless room, sir, and I promise you I will pull my skirt up to my waist, ready for you. But there must be a sheet over my face, to hide it; though the sheet must be laid over me so lightly that it will not choke me. So I shall be covered completely from the waist upwards, and no lights. There you can visit me once, sir, and only the once. After that I must be driven directly to the city and deposited in the public square, in front of the church. If you wish to give me money, then I should be pleased to receive it. But I must stress that you should give me only the same amount of money that you would give to any other woman in such circumstances. However, if you choose not to give me a present, then that is your right.'”

He would glance up at her occasionally as he wiped the pans clean. She’d wet her pretty lips. But he wasn’t stuck still, or frozen in time, when she spoke.

He was only soothed; not entranced.

“The tiger will never lie down with the lamb; he acknowledges no pact that is not reciprocal. The lamb must learn to run with the tigers.”

Chapter Text

"At that, they both fell silent, as if these strange companions were suddenly overcome with embarrassment to find themselves together, alone, in that room in the depths of the winter's night. As she was about to rise, he flung himself at her feet and buried his head in her lap. She stayed stock-still, transfixed; she felt his hot breath on her fingers, the stiff bristles of his muzzle grazing her skin, the rough lapping of his tongue and then, with a flood of compassion, understood: all he is doing is kissing my hands."

Angela Carter, The Courtship of Mr. Lyon.

She could not read at the next set appointment.

It was like he shifted forms when she called to cancel. All the air left his lungs.

“Why,” he hissed.

She was so real, under his hands, the night in her apartment. Enough to make him able to stand being without her until today.

Yet she sounded different to him now. It was her voice.

A sneeze answered his question.

Already he began to pace around his apartment like a cage. He wanted to rattle the bars. He could just leave, he was free to; and yet he knew that wouldn’t satisfy him.

His apartment was very white, and very blank, and very cold. The safety deposit was guarded heavily by the board of this building, an elderly neighbor had assured him it meant he should just redecorate every inch if he was never getting it back.

He never did.

He furnished it.

That was about it. The things he had were nice, but there was no deliberation to tie the room together. It was just a lot of black square shiny things pushed to fit into white right angles.

He slept as if cursed to sleep there, ate his meals alone there as if exiled in solitude, and waited.

He chose this as his imprisonment. He had for years.

She had to come to him.

“I just I’m not feeling so great,” she replied in her quietest, calmest voice. The eye of his storm. Striking him still every time she used this careful, maternal tone with him. “I will fulfill my obligation to you when-”

“Are you unwell?”

There was a growl in the back of her throat. Yes, she was unwell, he could perceive it in the change to her voice.

“It is just a cold, and a fever,” she said slowly, like she had to focus, “I can’t really get out of bed. I’ve been under the covers all morning.”

“Is anyone taking care of you?”

“Kylo, I’m an adult, I’ll be fine-”

“I’m having food brought to you.”

She groaned, petulant for once in the face of his calm rationale.

Her illness had reversed them. Instead of feeling lost; for once he knew exactly what to do for her.

He gave her no chance to argue before ending the call.

His coat was in his fist, he was out the door of his apartment.

“Rey?”

“Mmm?”

She sounded even grogginess than before. Half asleep. Her mouth barely moving to form the words into her phone.

An hour later, he was clearing the last of the twelve flights.

He was then  personally seeing to it that her elevator got fixed this week.

She sounded much worse. He could tell from the way she called him earlier, that affairs-in-order kind of dealing before the cloud of the fever descended, that she was going to be out of it.

He tried to hide how out-of-breath he sounded.

“I have...some food for you. Some soup.”

“Unh?”

“It’s already paid for. I...the delivery person will just leave it at the door.”

“Kylo.”

“Yes?”

There was a pause of a few seconds of nasal, congested breathing.

“There’s a wolf at the door.”

His mouth went dry, and after all those stairs, perceiving that change at all meant his fear was real. Not just nerves.

“Rey?”

There was another long, sickly pause, and then:

“I know you’re here.”

He slumped, bag of takeout in his hand: defeated and caught.

She laughed asthmatically. Like an old divining witch.

“These walls are really thin. I can hear you speaking to me by my head.”

He shut his eyes, biting back a curse. This horrible building and its lack of elevator and its towering stairwells and its walls that couldn’t keep secrets.

“I’ll...leave.”

“You wicked man,” her fevered voice laughed, “you wicked, wicked man. I did not ask you to come here.”

She sounded more delirious than anything else.

He waited silently out in the hallway outside her apartment for her orders.

Rey cleared her scratchy throat.

“There’s a woman down the hall who was going to check on me when she came home from work. There’s a key waiting for her, under the mat.”

“Dangerous,” he chastised in automatic response.

She coughed, scratching the wall that kept them apart from her side. He jumped at the sound.

And then placed his palm solidly against the surface, so she too knew his touch was there. And reciprocated.

“You’re right. I’m letting all sorts of monsters in.”

“Tell me to come in.”

Rey had a warm, dry chuckle. With the sickness in her lungs it was a rough cackle.

“Are you a vampire as well?”

“No,” he felt dizzy. “But ask me in to care for you. Otherwise I’ll just leave the soup in your kitchen.”

Maybe bring her an extra blanket before leaving.

“Mhmm,” there was the sound of her rolling over in bed.

The key was clutched in his hand before he thought better of it.

“Sleep with me?” she crooned in her heavy, thick voice, and he was crossing the threshold without another thought.

Rey’s presence in his life had grown to be slightly imperious. He of course held the pursestrings; she just used those strings to choke him if she felt like it. She had the thing he wanted; he merely had the thing she’d take in exchange.

She was a quilted princess, red-faced with her cheek mushed into a pillow. His longing was forgotten in a room warmed by her hot breath. Instead, she surrounded him and he was breathing so much easier.

He knelt by her side and felt cautiously at her flushed cheeks.

He could look at her all day. But her expression was uncomfortable and her skin was pale.

Soup first.

“Are you alright?”

Her eyes were shiny as he lit her bedside lamp.

“I’ll live.”

“Hmm,” he was not impressed with the answer, and went to her kitchen for a bowl and spoon.

“Don’t spill,” she groaned at him, as if agitated, when he made the unwise decision to transfer the soup from its plastic takeout container into a cheery blue bowl while crouching on the floor of her bedroom. She watched, unmoving, but wary as he endangered her rug.

He lifted a smug face to her.

She had given him little control for these interactions. Now she was bundled and delicate. She took little spoons of soup into her mouth, guided by his hand, without any protest. Her bruised eyes fluttered shut.

He wanted very badly to touch her to test her delicacy under his own fingers.

Though the better of it when he saw something clinging to the lid of the coup container; a single pea.

He rolled it against a napkin until the thick broth was not clinging to the skin, and then neatly, as she rested her eyes with a furrowed brow, he dropped the pea onto her top layer of blankets.

Her eyes snapped open as soon as it landed. She looked at her bedspread.

“What are you doing?”

He wanted to kiss her then very badly. Instead he neatly swept the pea up in his fingers, offending object it was, and hid it in the bag the food came in.

“Would you like to be read to?”

Her eyes flashed. Pleased. He’d never read to her; she once joked, though it could reasonably be true, that she wondered if he could read at all.

He was never much of a reader, but the offer to be the one to read aloud this time made him feel...powerful.

She nodded into her pillow.

“Come up on the bed.”

“You sure about that?”

She had offered, but it was a delirious offer.

Her tone was slightly embarrassed:

“You look warm.”

His knee pressed into the mattress. He didn’t want to move her, as her body probably pressed all her warmth into the very spot that she rested on. So he crawled into her bed behind her, spooning her with a chaste distance between them, his back presses carefully against the wall so not to crowd her.

“Warm enough?”

“Uh huh…” she cuddled her face down into her pillow. It was blisteringly hot from his side of things; but she was clearly trying to break a fever.

He tried not to touch her as he reached for the book on her bedside table. It was The Bloody Chamber; her paper has been invading his life as fully as hers.

He thumbed to a place she had bookmarked:

“I do not mean to hurt you. I shall wait for you in my bride's dress in the dark.

The bridegroom is come, he will go into the chamber which has been prepared for him.

I am condemned to solitude and dark; I do not mean to hurt you.

I will be very gentle. ”

He laughed softly, “This one would sound much better coming from you.”

She shushed him, as though a third voice read, and he was distracting her from that speaker. As though it were not really him.

He felt the exact same way when she made quiet asides about the books.

She shushed him, and yet she babbled:

“Waiting for you in my bride’s dress,” and pressed her college-tee wearing self into his chest. It was stained and ratty. Nothing was ever perfect: the gray material even closer up was dotted with pills. He laughed, a hand coming around her body to cup her tight little stomach; swollen from a feeding of soup. A flare of pleasure hit him like a truck. She was warm and fed and safe because he inhabited her bed right now.

Rey reached behind them, her ark stretching over his head, her sleeve drooping to swipe against his cheek.

"I thought," she brushed her hand behind his head, tapping the wall with her fingers, "I thought you were trapped inside the wall when I heard your voice."

How startling it must have been to hear him speak from the other side of her wall.

"I'm right here," he soothed.

"I didn't know how to get you out."

"Shh."

He rubbed his thumb in a circle on her stomach as he read to her.

“Now it is dark. Bats swoop and squeak outside the tightly shuttered windows. The coffee is all drunk, the sugar biscuits eaten. Her chatter comes trickling and diminishing to a stop; she twists her fingers together, picks at the lace of her dress, shifts nervously in her chair. Owls shriek; the impedimenta of her condition squeak and gibber all around us. Now you are at the place of annihilation, now you are at the place of annihilation. She turns her head away from the blue beams of his eyes; she knows no other consummation than the only one she can offer him. She has not eaten for three days. It is dinner-time. It is bedtime.”

The room was dark when he woke up. His nose tucked into the nape of a sweaty little neck.

Someone had turned off the lamp; but he could not recall if it was him or not.

Rey was breathing steadily; if heavily. Intent. Not the shallow pants of her fevered sleep. She was awake.

“Rey?”

“Uh huh?”

She had to keep her mouth open; her nose didn’t let in enough air so it had to rest agape in order to breathe. It made her “talking” just these gap-jawed exhalations.

“How are you feeling?”

“Strange,” she admitted, and he spooned closer to her warm back.

She sighed contentedly. Her next move was prefaced by a subtle rock; gaining momentum to roll to her back so his spooning turned to hovering half over her upturned chest.

Her eyes were deadened by her fever; from silver to mercury. He leaned close.

He hunched over her greedily like a dragon over his hoard.

Her hands settled casually on her belly as she looked up at him.

“Thank you,” she mouthed, completely without her voice.

And it hit him harder than a truck this time, like a freight train, like a tidal wave, that she did not need her voice to make him need her.

He bowed his head.

She shivered, eyes full of impractical dreams of kisses and sighs, but he took her hands in his and instead of the ravishment they both saw coming…

He merely kissed her hands.

Rey let out a cool breath as his lips pressed to one palm, then the other, and he just gratefully kissed her hands. For sleeping beside him; odd thing that he was. For letting him in. For letting him care for her.

He kissed the length of each slender finger, her knuckles that were more knobbed than they were graceful from years of contorting around the spines and pages of books, her wrists. His tongue darted out to taste her skin, and he growled and huffed into her flesh, but he never strayed from just his kisses to her hands.

Her fingers would stretch to brush his lips, or his cheeks, or slide down the length of his nose. She explored him curiously.

He did nothing more than nuzzle her hands to show his devotion.

“Are you going to eat me?” she wondered aloud, her hands relaxed and soft as he nibbled and licked every soft swell of flesh over spidery bone.

He pulled his hungry mouth away.

“Hmm,” he looked down at her: pinned, prone, with shining eyes, “Not unless you want me to.”

He was now trapped with Freder for an afternoon a week. He wasn’t sure when he agreed to that.

Poe was a crafty bastard. Cancellations kept piling up on the Damerons, apparently, that Freder needed an extra adult for the next few weeks. This kept happening. Freder parked on his couch, gurgling, nursery rhymes chiming from his television.

But Rey was for hire for those hours.

Because it was for the good of a child; she was much more amiable towards this arrangement. 

She liked Freder, knew how to speak to him, didn’t mind his wide moon-eyes pouring into her.

Kylo navigated the busy streets like hounds around a horse during a hunt. Freder in Rey’s arms, tucked under her black umbrella. He cleared her path through the crowded sidewalk with a snarling ferocity, the rain beating down, while they made their way to some ridiculous toyshop.

“We don’t have to go,” Rey had insisted quietly as she helped Freder into his raincoat back at the apartment. Kylo would not meet her at her place again unless he had to. Not after all he had carried up and down those accursed stairs. “You’re the one who suggested it because you’re trying to bribe your godson.”

He had suggested it, and for the exact reason, and he dragged them to the store anyway like they were on the run from something.

At a trickier intersection, his arm secured itself firmly around her waist, pressed to her back, but she just glanced from him to Freder, comfortably oblivious under her umbrella, and seemed to want to drop it.

Freder wore a little rubbery green raincoat, but Kylo and Rey were in a rare complimentary black. She had wellies on, which were hardly sexy, but it was a welcome change from the ugly sneakers, and with a simple black trench coat and her hair slicker from the rain he would dare call her chic looking like this.

He would dare say that the frigid air around them felt infinite and purposeful; now that he could pretend he had exactly what he wanted.

Inside the store, they were immediately overwhelmed. It was so fast; from gray to explosive color. Even Freder wrinkled his nose and turned his face into Rey’s shoulder.

If Kylo thought the children at the library were loud it was only because he was vastly unprepared for all this.

Rey took his hand, growling to herself, and practically carried both Freder and Kylo to the elevator.

He clung to her hand, his brave girl, half-dragging him through a screaming, frenzied crowd.

She led them to a section of the store that was unoccupied; liberated territory from name-branded toys. Instead filled with hand-sewn stuffed toys and wooden blocks and puppets.

Kylo was reluctant to agree that this would occupy a toddler, but as she correctly pointed out, it was the only part of the store where a child could actually play with something not carefully sealed into a box and trapped behind plastic.

She bounced a little lamb puppet on her hand, bumping the nose dangerously close to Freder’s; a game of almost-being-caught that could occupy the boy for...oh, hours.

She smiled just as enthusiastically every single time Freder squealed with delight and horror when he was almost either bitten or kissed by the puppet.

“Here,” she could only grab with her puppet-hand, so for a moment it looked like the lamb plucked up a lion puppet in it’s teeth. She handed it to him.

He took it, staring at the limp, furry fabric, then at her, and it was like the constant buzz of screaming children went silent. The hum after an explosion where time went still.

She raised her eyebrows, busy with Freder in one arm and her own puppet with the other.

“The lion is going to try and eat me,” she said in her soft lamb-voice. At Freder, to Kylo. Instructing him.

He put the hand-puppet on like a surgical glove. And stared at it.

Rey was looking carefully up at him, and uneasy concern on her face. She nuzzled the lamb’s face into Freder’s laughing chest, and the squeals around them were a layer of safety when she finally looked sadly up at Kylo and asked;

“You don’t know how to play, do you?”

Rey waited on the street when Kylo dropped Freder off at home, laden with gifts.

Her own bag from the toyshop was dangling heavily from her hands when he returned to her one the sidewalk.

Finn and Poe knew Rey from the library, but it was clear she didn’t want them questioning how much time she was spending with Kylo, at least not to her face.

She smiled when she saw him walk through the front door of their building. He couldn't picture the last time someone saw him walk through a door and smile just because it was him.

Kylo wanted to put his arm around her waist to walk with her again. He wanted to ask her about the things she made him buy at the toy store; her first direct request for a physical item from him that had his credit card slicing through the air like a platinum sword.

“I was a friend’s bridal shower this spring, and the cake was pure frosting,” she shook her head as she walked, her hair falling from her bun and hanging down in one slick, high ponytail instead, “and on the train ride home I was getting lockjaw from the sugar high. That’s how I feel right now.”

He softened, laughing quietly, and looking down at the wet pavement. He wanted to savor it. This personal detail, when she was so stingy with them.

That store had that same effect on them both. He was buzzing and distracted like someone had melted a jolly rancher and shot it straight into his veins. Even Freder looked sick and tired of children when they walked out into a rain-damp dusk.

“Should I escort you to the station, then?”

He didn’t know why he was being so formal. they'd shared a bed twice now. She’d been around some pretty severe erections with him, made him wash her dishes, listened to him insult her shoes. There was a prickling need in the air outside for him to act like a gentleman tonight.

“I thought I was reading to you first?” she raised her eyebrows at him.

They had fallen into step together so easily.

That was the plan.

“If you want.”

She swung the plastic bag in her fist. Knocking it against the back of his leg on purpose with a small smile.

He had dictated everything he ever wanted her to do. She accepted on her terms. That was their arrangement.

She looked hopefully up at him. A shy smile gracing her pretty lips.

“Maybe we could try something first? Before...before bed?”

He felt his blood shoot through his veins at the rate of his heart.

“Will you spend the night?”

“I suppose if I am very tired, I will,” a street lamp lit a curve of her cheek so well it was like a guiding light to press his lips to it.

He refrained, even in the privacy of Finn and Poe’s quiet starter-neighborhood.

“Then may I…” he glanced desperately to the nearest cross street, “hail us a taxi so we can get home quickly?”

The bag sat on the carpet of his bedroom. Rey removed a box of tin soldiers, an array of stuffed animals, a lion’s head that slipped on and exposed the face like a ski-mask with a full mane littering behind.

“I want you,” she sat back on the floor like a child psychologist about to do some elaborate evaluation, “to play with me.”

Kylo reached for her, a hand cupping around her ribs, right under her breast. He smiled to himself, smug in his cleverness, as he leaned forward to pull her closer-

She pushed back, gently but firmly, on his shoulders.

He gave her ribcage one little circle from his thumb. She did shiver, but still held him firmly back.

“I am not the toy,” she growled.

He sat back, petulant, as she leaned to pluck up the lion-head and as punishment, crowned him with it.

It was tight, and itchy, and from her smirk, must have looked ridiculous.

He picked up a tin soldier and made a face.

“This is childish.”

“You make me read to you every night.”

He made a sour face and adjusted his grip on the soldier.

“What is the point of all this?”

She shrugged. “It might feel good.”

“You know what else might feel goo-”

“You know, the Brontës based their entire early canon on how they’d play with their toy soldiers together,” she raised her eyebrows, dancing one she had selected from the box across the floor, towards his. “If it’s good enough for the Brontës, it is good enough for you.”

He sat back. Distrusting.

She set her soldier aside.

“Why are you such a grumpy lion?”

He glared at her.

“Because you insist on vexing me.”

Rey fell forward onto her palms. On all fours.

She crawled forward. Nothing in his apartment was plush, and her knees where marked red from the rug rubbing underneath them. All he could think about was how raw, how red he could make them, and then kiss those burns away from her sweet skin.

“How do I vex you?”

“With all your demands.”

“Mr. Lion,” she shook her head at him, “you are so easy to vex.”

Her fingers tangled in the fake fur around his head.

He'd keep playing if she kept touching him.

“Why?” she purred.

“Because the one thing I want won’t-”

“A princess,” she guided effortlessly, “who can’t be yours?”

This had worked him up intensely, game or not he was having this conversation now.

“Yes, exactly.”

She picked up a stiffed cat and placed it beside a stuffed lamb, as if paired. 

“Is she someone else’s?”

“Not that I know of,” he relaxed his posture into something more, leonine, more casually lethal, and then nudged the cat and lamb apart, “would you tell me if she was?”

Rey lifted the lamb so it rested above their heads on the mattress.

“So she is merely locked away,” Rey kept her eyes even and her tone firm, as though that was the only hint he was going to get, “have you tried everything to get to her?”

The lamb gazed down at him with its glazed glass eyes. Judging.

“All my wealth, all my time, all my attention,” he confessed mournfully, “it is not enough.”

“That’s not everything,” Rey almost pouted. She was using her storytelling voice; more effective than a meat hook for getting his guts out of him. “That’s not a real sacrifice.”

It was never enough for her.

He continued to glare as she leaned closer.

"Or is it because she's not a lion? And you just don't know how to turn into a man?"

With a feral groan, he pounced on her. He ripped the stupid mask off his face, Rey writhing on the carpet under his hands, until he picked her up and tossed her onto his bed.

She was breathless, her skirt up around flexing thighs, looking up at him like she was going to be devoured.

And he merely paced to the other side of the room, took her book out of her bag, and handed it to her.

With a sulky sigh, he took his spot on the bed next to her, his back facing her in a petulant, closed off way but still an open invitation for her to spoon him.

The moment was surprisingly tender. Surprising himself most of all, because he was sure if he had tried to fuck her, she would have let him. But he wanted this instead.

Rey sat up, thumbing open the book with shaking hands.

“I should have made you clean up your mess first,” she chastised in a low voice, flipping roughly through the pages.

He said nothing. She would read.

“How strange he was. She found his bewildering difference from herself almost intolerable; its presence choked her. There seemed a heavy, soundless pressure upon her in his house, as if it lay under water, and when she saw the great paws lying on the arm of his chair, she thought: they are the death of any tender herbivore. And such a one she felt herself to be, Miss Lamb, spotless, sacrificial.”

He fidgeted beside her and pressed his spine insistently against her body. She paused, a hand brushing up and down his arm, until she cuddled into his broad back:

“But he, hesitantly, as if he himself were in awe of a young girl who looked as if she had been carved out of a single pearl, asked after her father's law case; and her dead mother; and how they, who had been so rich, had come to be so poor. He forced himself to master his shyness, which was that of a wild creature, and so she contrived to master her own--to such effect that soon she was chattering away to him as if she had known him all her life. When the little cupid in the gilt clock on the mantelpiece struck its miniature tambourine, she was astonished to discover it did so twelve times.”

She dug her thumb into the nape of his neck.

This stirred him from his sleepiness. Curious, he ceased his pouting and rolled over. She did not move an inch until he looked into her eyes.

Rey licked her dry lips.

“Suck my nipple,” she ordered quietly, parting the wrap of her dress to free a breast for him.

It was so perfect in the dim light all he could do was stare at it for a moment. His sweaty hair fell into his face.

Then he dove for her, his mouth wide and searching, and she did not continue until he took a firm latch and rested down on the mattress. He held onto her so tightly. Her grip on him was soft and tender. She stroked his hair as they lay on their sides, his head to her breast and his eyes rolled back, closed, and twitching all at once.

He was so busy following her order he did not know how to do this other than fully and greedily. It was just a pull of his suckling mouth for a few minutes as if she was merely putting him to bed.

Rey looked entirely too bored.

Maybe because he was nursing from an empty breast.

Pretending, as she had asked him to.

He hollowed and flicked his tongue against the bud at home in his mouth. This did make her tremble, her hands tight in his long hair.

She wasn’t his reader anymore. She was Rey.

And he wanted her pleasure more than his own.

She pushed him onto his back with a groan when his lips worked her tit with something other than the desire to consume. Caressing it. Rolling it. Lapping with his tongue so it was hard and she moaned, losing her words.

“Y- yet still his strangeness made her shiver; -Kylo-  and when he helplessly fell before her to kiss her hands, as he did every night when they parted, (oh God oh God oh God) she would retreat nervously into her skin, flinching at his touch -please-”

He laid flat on his back, blinking at the ceiling and praying he had not done something wrong, when she straddled his lap and pulled her second breast free and hung it over his mouth.

One hand pressed down on his chest to keep herself steady, the other propped the book open on his headboard.

“Are you sleepy yet?” he kissed across the curve of her untouched breast. The other was hot, sensitive, and flushed full of red blood, so he flicked it with his fingers and she keened above him. “Should I make you sleepy?”

She tossed the book aside and pushed her neglected breast into his waiting mouth.

“Mhmm.”

She was under a similar spell.

He rolled her over him onto her other side.

He’d liked this position. Curled towards each other. His head against her chest. Safe.

“Good boy,” she stroked her fingers into his scalp to encourage his licking. This time she reacted more enthusiastically, less like she was giving him a favor.

That gate seemed finally unlocked:

“Sing for me,” he ordered darkly, before returning his mouth on her tit to suck.

Rey’s head fell back on the pillow and a sleepy song filled the room as he drank.

Chapter Text

'Don't die, Beast! If you'll have me, I'll never leave you.' When her lips touched the meat-hook claws, they drew back into their pads and she saw how he had always kept his fists clenched but now, painfully, tentatively, at last began to stretch his fingers. Her tears fell on his face like snow and, under their soft transformation, the bones showed through the pelt, the flesh through the wide, tawny brow. And then it was no longer a lion in her arms but a man, a man with an unkempt mane of hair and, how strange, a broken nose, such as the noses of retired boxers, that gave him a distant, heroic resemblance to the handsomest of all the beasts.

Angela Carter, "The Courtship of Mr. Lyon"

They woke with a sudden clarity at a blue light coming in from the open shades.

It wasn’t the black and mysterious night they had wrapped themselves in. They were exposed like ancient bone in the bleaching light.

His soft mouth was up against her naked breast. Practically steaming it with warm, sleepy breaths. Her fingers interlaced with his black hair. A pink nipple hardened in the light from his presence so close to it, his open lips ready slip forward and envelope it again.

Rey stretched underneath him, blinking her eyes. He felt her muscles all at once restrict, and then loosen underneath him in a slow melt.

He had to go to work.

But he was slowly forgetting there was a real world out there.

Neither of them could speak until he brushed his thumb curiously along her lips.

Her mouth actually parted pliantly for him, opening and wetting his skin, almost a suck. He dared not hope intentionally.

This was pushing it, the ability to go back to normal, the arrangement. Just happening to want a good morning kiss without a phone call and three consultations to their personal calendars. It felt off script.

He spoke off book anyway:

“May I kiss you here?”

Rey nodded, her eyes wide. Pretty dark lashes and flickering irises.

He lurched up clumsily, then when he neared her, remembered what it was about her mouth he feared and went wild for all at once. He stopped short of her skin, breathing into her o-shaped lips. Hovering awkwardly. Self-control chording every muscle.

His chest heaved for a few seconds as he blinked and swallowed, under a spell. He didn’t want to break it by touching her. Or he didn’t want it to melt into a curse by starting this.

“You’d better hurry before I’m awake,” she advised in a dreamy whisper, her legs doing that tense-and-relax underneath him once more, but the relax was more fluid than before, puddling him into her as her legs fell casually open. Bringing him closer.

Then he pressed his lips to hers.

He pulled back.

“Am I crushing you?”

His eyelids fluttered as he looked down at her. Rey raised her eyebrows dryly.

Shook her head. Her hands resting on the pillow beside her head, fingers curled into her palms in a show of her submission.

He sank down, breathless, kissing her more intently.

He was kissing her. She was receptive, but not active.

It was exactly what was negotiated.

He kissed her.

Kylo tapped his fingers along her open dress, hammering them there with hummingbird lightness and pace against her sternum.

She hummed, her spine arching into the mattress.

“May I kiss you here?”

“You may,” she urged his head down, and he slithered there obediently. He nipped along the swells rising on either side of her breastbone, and then pressed his doting kisses up her mounds, on her nipples, prompting quiet breaths from Rey above him.

She was a perfect thing in his bed. His hungry mouth devoured her. She fed him well: until his muscles were coiled like an animal hunched over her. Hungrier for having been given a taste.

Feral, he pushed up and fisted his hands in her half-unraveled wrap dress. She blinked at him, then leaned back with a sigh, and he parted the covering until she lay naked in his bed.

Freckled. Little red scratches on the V of skin under her hip bone from a sloppy shave. Lined with imprints of the dress that wrinkled against her skin in sleep.

Rey.

Perfect.

“May I kiss you here?”

He began to open her thighs, but the effort got away from him as she slid them open on her own free will. She slid her own panties down frantically, tangling up in her kicking feet, and he would have had some reaction of amusement if her eagerness did not make him feel entirely raw. 

“Please,” she looked down at him as he hunched over her, like the monster who almost ate her when she was so sick and kissed her little hands instead, “don’t offer me money for this.”

Rey’s lovely voice sounded like it was choking.

He nodded, still dreaming, still trying to scheme up some way to reward her for this gift.

For he still thought this was all for him.

“Yes,” she permitted then.

He bowed his head and slid his hungry tongue into her sex for a taste. She was so wet, and trembling, and crying for release.

What a lost little thing, wandered into his castle. He dipped his head deeper between her thighs and looked up at her darkly as he drank from her tender lips. It was animalistic lapping, nothing so skilled or dirty as trying to make anything he knew about women satisfied. His strokes sometimes tickled against her clit, and she always whimpered at that. There was the sense to redouble efforts, but when she was shaking and keening from that focus, he became curious for her depths.

So he’d switch to that instead.

She growled as his tongue abandoned the needy pearl and circled her entrance.

“Kylo,” she chirped out, her thighs straining under his hands.

“Be my--” he lifted his head suddenly, feeling wild. His hair stuck up in all directions. Her eyelids fluttered as she looked down at him: looking so pale and cool underneath him, even while panting and sighing.

He sighed in turn, kissing her open thighs.

“Be my princess,” he finally said, unable to look at her as though he himself was unworthy.

Her hand fisted in his hair and raised him up to examine suspiciously. His mouth shone with her lusty juices.

“But if you’re the king,” she shifted her hips to cradle herself and him more comfortably in his bed, “then I want to be your empress.”

He bowed his head again and feasted on her swollen cunt. Both finally aware that using his mouth on her had a dangerous proximity to teeth. He nibbled threateningly at her labia, not enough to hurt but enough to know he could do as much harm to her flesh than pleasure-

And then went back to kissing her clit, sucking it into his mouth, plying it gently with his tongue.

She didn’t get it: if she was the princess, he was her slave.

She arched her hips into his face and shuddered.

It was so easy, he forgot it was happening. Only that he must keep doing what he was doing, Rey was crying out for him and clinging and he answered with his slithering, obedient tongue, but he didn’t realize she came until she was limp underneath him and he half-thought he had cursed her to sleep again.

She came so hard he thought he broke her.

“My princess,” he tried gently, kissing her inner thigh until she combed her fingers into his hair. He flopped down on top of her, keening into her gentle touches. “What can I give you for this?”

“Kylo,” and the spell was broken again.

She sat up, guiding him to the bed like a nanny to a small child, like a nurse laying him down to be sick, with a concerned expression on her brow like something was wrong with him.

He lay pliant on his side on the mattress. He knew.

Rey tied her wrap dress shut with shaking hands. He had cheapened what she gave him: his chest flushed with shame.

But he didn’t know how to feel with what she had given him. It was so precious to him, so perfect.

Rey was padding barefoot through the toy-strewn floor.

“You must pick up your things,” she said dryly, and left him in his messy room.

They took Freder out for three afternoons a week. Finn and Poe were thrilled. They had a way of talking excitedly about him doing normal things, like being socialized, as the only indication their son was behind in any way on that front.

Freder seemed indifferent to the arrangement, even though Rey was always bribing him with sweets and Kylo with gifts. Rey never said no to a cookie, Kylo never said no to either of them.

He just was the unifying piece between them, keeping the civil, providing them distraction, and he was so unswayed by their devotion to the routine it was almost as if he knew he was being used as a prop.

He would act positively too cool to be around them when they dropped him off at night. Arms laden with gifts, Poe and Finn chattering away to prompt him to talk about his day with Uncle Ben. Freder wouldn’t answer. Kylo supposed they deserved that. But the kid was getting spoiled rotten in all the ways he wished he could spoil Rey.

Then they went home and Kylo nibbled and sucked at her breasts while she read to him.

"He strips me to my last nakedness, that underskin of mauve, pearlized satin, like a skinned rabbit; then dresses me again in an embrace so lucid and encompassing it might be made of water. And shakes over me dead leaves as if into the stream I have become."

It was almost happiness. Almost, there were times sitting on a bench in Central Park just the three of them, Rey passing a snack from her bag to each of the boys with her gentle grace, that he felt he could sit in the moment and be grateful for what it was.

And then Rey would look at him and it was not enough.  

There would be moments when he purred into her perfect chest and arched his monstrous body to pin her to the bed and she would whimper and mewl and it was almost enough.

"His skin covers me entirely; we are like two halves of a seed, enclosed in the same integument. I should like to grow enormously small, so that you could swallow me, like those queens in fairy tales who conceive when they swallow a grain of corn or a sesame seed. Then I could lodge inside your body and you would bear me."

He lifted his breathless head from her nipple after a few weeks of careful nursing.

“Will you go to a work event with me?”

Rey was equally breathless underneath. They had not advanced past him devouring every inch of her body with his lips. He could kiss her anywhere. But she did not kiss back.

She lay pliant like a sleeping empress and let him take.

“Yes.”

“Will you wear a nice dress and kiss me without me having to ask?”

“Yes.”

“Will you let me take you home and part your thighs and call you my princess?”

“Yes, Kylo,” she sighed, almost exasperated, her thighs squeezing his one pressed between her legs.

“Name your price.”

She shook her head, her hair fanning across the pillows. She arched her spine to tempt his lips back to her pretty pink breasts. A desperate hiccup escaped her lips when he, somewhat selfishly, rolled his tongue against her breast in the midst of a negotiation.

So it was successful to him when her answer was:

“Just keep doing that.”

He kept Rey informed about what he’d have her wear: they tiptoed around that, the propriety required for his work event, so she couldn’t get away with wearing something she owned. He told her to come as she was to his apartment and he’d have her get ready there. It was a costume to her, though he’d try to pick something she like, he knew if it was a gift she’d recoil once again.

There was an odd gleam in her eye when he opened the door for her: like she was angry and amused, but nothing so warm towards him.

“The strangest thing happened,” she said by way of explanation for her swirling and dark mood as she unwound her scarf, “My elevator is working.”

He helped her coat off her arms silently, hanging it up by the door.

“Is it?”

“Been out of order for a long time. People have died in that building waiting for it to be fixed.

“Hopefully not on the stairs.”

“Kylo.”

He knelt at her feet, untying her ugly sneakers.

He let his eyes glitter wickedly up at her. But that was on the only answer she received. She sighed when he lifted a bare foot out of her shoe, unrolled her sock, and pressed his lips to the arch underneath. His hands moved up and down her calf until she relaxed, then he set that foot down and did the same with the other one.

The event was not a ball, or anything too fancy, but it did require a cocktail dress and a pair of nice high heels.

She glared at him when she had to put them on.

“I can’t let you wear those things to a reception,” he insisted, smiling at her as he slid his suit jacket on. They dressed partially together, in his room, and it felt practiced. Familiar, it felt familiar. He had a dress brought for her that was black silk and showed off her pretty arms and shoulders. She’d never worn anything cut like that around him.

He helped her with the zipper and he couldn’t breathe until she stepped away from him, like he had sealed himself inside the dress against her skin.

His behavior that evening was going to be strange. He just hoped she could stand it. She’d taken all of his eccentricities so well until now. Maybe the elevator was overkill. He had thought it would soften her to be more receptive tonight.

It clearly hadn’t: and she was quiet in the cab next to him for the whole ride.

He sighed, and she sat to herself. They had a way of opening themselves up with Freder between them, almost to create a gate from keeping him from bounding away.

But their posture was knowing now, they couldn’t pretend it wasn’t, because of constant immersion.

To see her sit completely to herself, without so much as a toe or knee pointed at him, made his throat ache and his fear in his plan not working spike.

And the look on her face when the car stopped and he gave the first instruction was what broke him.

“Your name is on the list,” he said quietly, that meaning in his eyes like the first awkward coffee they had shared, when he sat her down and told her what he needed and she listened and provided.

Rey was harder to provide for. Rey didn’t need anything.

She stared at him in silence, confusion furrowing her brow.

“I want you to go in without me, and I’ll meet you.”

She leaned back in the seat, lips parted indignantly, before they pulled back over her teeth in a sneer as the cab idled at the museum entrance.

“Kylo, I won’t know anyone.”

“I know,” he said softly, pleading, “It won’t be long. Just get settled and I’ll follow you right in.”

“Why?” she was looking steadily into him. Like she had thought she had already been given the catch, maybe the new clothes, and this was something else entirely.

He couldn’t give a good enough answer.

“Please,” he said instead.

Rey blinked at him. She was the one who should be asking; don’t do what you’re doing and instead listen to me. But she wasn’t. He was.

She stared at him for a long moment. The driver was clearing his throat, but the car still running, so there was no objection to milk whatever rang up the meter.

He didn’t say anything and let her make the next move.

She swiped up the purse he bought for the occasion with a steady glare and exited the cab.

He met her this time in the gemstone room.

Everything glittered, including the earrings he picked out for her and the shiny black finishings on her dress. She had a cocktail in hand. She was alone, staring in a sort of detached way at the displays only to have something to look at. She looked bored, in need of rescue.

He saw her shrug off the advances of Hux and wanted to glow with pride, but then there came a certain shame that it happened because he left her alone.

He saw her, and he wanted her, and he was the kind of man to go after what he wanted.

“Hello,” he swept in, but didn’t touch her, like she was his date for the event. In fact, he hovered like a stranger.

Rey wavered, relief and irritation warring on her face, falling to confusion when he did not invade a friendly amount of personal space, as though they didn’t were strangers.

“Hello,” she answered slowly, sensing his detachment. Rey was game for a lot of his more bizarre whims, it was the crux of their entire intimacy, so she was letting him lead on this. Leading and possibly dragging her along.

He held out his hand. She stared at it, clutching her wine glass with two. Her neat-dark-painted fingernails overlapping to cup the glass.

“I couldn’t help but notice you,” he said easily, “Kylo.”

She didn't take his hand.

“Rey.”

She was staring at him, her eyes shining, but her expression wasn’t warm. Only examining and intent. Like when he was just a strange man with a child she recognized, or a lurker in the bookshelves.

He saw the moment it clicked in her mind.

That he had taken them back to the night they should have met. That he would have talked to her. What was impossible to take back and prove again.

How this could have started if he were just normal.

Their date went well. Sort of. Meeting Rey at the place where they didn’t meet. She got very drunk, but they had a chemistry that couldn’t really be fought, so even when she had her hackles up at this odd game, she gave it back fairly, with skill.

He introduced her, as though not a stranger, to a few coworkers, his hand at her lower back, but that was all in the vein of intimacy that came from anything before this night.

She was stiff under his hand. He led her around the cases of hematite and chrysocolla and pink agate inside of smooth cracked open like the flesh of a fig.

“Seems like an ideal place to go ring shopping,” he tried once, to make her laugh, to shake off the oddness he had injected between them.

Rey merely sipped in front of display of warring shoots of smoky quartz crystal extending in all directions out of an unassuming gray stone.

“Would you like to pick something out?” he tried when she only laughed like someone she had to laugh in the company in. Not because she was amused.

“Ben,” she said quietly, and he blinked at her. No one called him Ben anymore, other than Freder.

“What’s wrong?”

She stepped back from the glass of the display. The room was dark so the pops of color came from the cases, so the eye was drawn to them. Rey was becoming hidden in the center of the room.

“I need to go.”

When they descended the museum steps at the end of the night, her shaking hands dug through the purse that was not hers.

“Are you alright?”

She kept rooting through the bag as though looking for something, finding nothing, as though the distress needed to be grounded in search for something. The bag held her keys and phone, and some lipstick. He knew because he saw her transfer her possessions into it before they left.

He had thought he would have cured her concerns tonight: but this clearly horrified her somehow. She shook her head, and he stopped her still on the steps with hands on her elbows. Once he put hands on her he felt how much she needed to be held up.

“Hey, hey,” he tried to get her to meet his eyes, “what’s wrong?”

“I really need you to pay me for this, Kylo.”

She said it like it hurt her more than anything in the world. Tears streamed down her cheeks. “I need to know that this was just a game. That it was just a story.”

He readily grabbed at that condition, reaching for his wallet without thinking.

“Anything you want. I don’t have a lot of cash on me, but take it, take all of it.”

She had the stack of bills in her fist and wandered down the steps, the park full of sinister black trees across the street, the sidewalk below fairly empty in this late hour.

“Rey?”

“I want some water,” she murmured staring into the trees, and he bounded down the rest of the steps to a vendor on the sidewalk, probably hoping to scope out drunks leaving the event.

Anything to please her. This state she was in terrified him.

He was only wrapping up the purchase of a somehow four-dollar bottled water when he turned back to Rey on the sidewalk, her cheeks flushed, talking to a hunched over man in rags and dirty sneakers.

“Anthony?” she repeated back his name in introduction, entranced in a story as she was catching the stranger’s name. “I’m Rey.”

Anthony was clinging to her hand, and she let him, listening more intently to him than anyone had every listened to Kylo in his life.

Kylo couldn’t hear the deranged string of words that came from his lips: but it was the typical story, the kind heard thousands of times on subway platforms that you just get used to ignoring after a while, and Rey had lived in this city long enough to not fall for this as intently as she was now.

“Yeah, yeah,” she said absently, nodding as she dug through her purse and handed over all the cash. “Of course.”

“Hey God bless you, ma’am, I’m going to pray for you tonight.”

She was clinging to Anthony’s hands until Kylo came to take her away.

Kylo had watched her give it all up like it meant nothing to her.

Then why ask for it?

Rey wouldn’t talk to him in the cab home. He didn’t try very hard to get her to, because he didn’t know the questions to ask.

Her clothes, her shoes, everything that was hers, was still up at his place, and she seemed insistent on being allowed to change back into them instead of having him drop them off the next morning, even promptly, even tonight if he went straight home and she could go to her place and get ready for bed to have them dropped off.

“Why did you give all my money away?”

It felt bitter between them. She wanted him to prove something to her and she tossed it away. And now she was upset. He didn’t understand it.

She shook her head, looking at the rain-spattered window. She was crying.

“Because I don’t want it.”

He sighed heavily through his nose.

“Then why ask for it?”

“Because it’s what you give me. And I don’t fucking want it. So it might as well go to someone who needs it.”

“Have you,” he tried not to let anger dictate his tone that she was just handing out his money on the street, “have you been doing this with all the money I give you?”

“What I do with it once you give it to me is none of your concern.”

He took a steadying breath, but she’d really rattled his cage tonight.

“I will prepare an envelope for tonight that will be given to you at our next reading, however, I would like to arrange a way to direct-deposit our future transactions so they can be put towards tuition, housing--”

“Enough, Kylo,” she shivered in her seat hunched against the window, as far away from him as possible, “you are paying for my time. You’re not buying me.”

They still had to reclaim her possessions from his apartment. The elevator ride up was a tense one, but far better than stairs.

“Rey,” he tried gently, and she blinked away from him. “Please. What did I do?”

“We can't pretend forever,” she closed her eyes as though sick, "I let this go too far."

“Don’t you want to be someone’s princess sometimes? A coddled thing, cared for, precious? You are precious to me,” he tried to reason with her, drawing her towards him.

Wine made her head slump back as she looked cruelly up at him.

“That is for me to decide to want. I want to care for myself.”

“Why are you so angry with me?”

Her eyes flashed at him.

“If you want to recreate the night we almost met...does this mean you would take all of this back?”

He leaned back against the railing of the elevator. Floored. The bell dinged when they reached his level.

There were a few moments of them just breathing, and the doors nearly shut in that time, but she slammed out a hand to hold them open at the last second.

Rey pushed past him to get out. They both spilled messily into the hallway, pace hard and fast to make it to his door.

Security cameras would yielded something like desire, a torrid affair, at their briskness to get to his place. But it was a rush not to undress, but to part, in both of them.

“Take it back?”

“If you want to reset,” she waited for him to unlock his door with her arms crossed, “fine, we don’t know each other. You’re just a man that I met at a cocktail party. But that also means you’d rather have this clean slate so badly that nothing we had meant anything to you.”

She brushed through the door he barely pulled open, flinging the high heels off her feet and into his living room.

“That’s not--”

“You cannot have both.”

“I just want to be normal.”

The sound echoed through the stark walls, but she was not afraid of a little roaring.

She was yelling now too, because he had:

“You just get the life you have, Kylo! You can’t just buy a new one! You can’t keep using me and your godson as props so you can feel like you have a family you never tried for. You can only use money to get the world to kneel to you before nothing fucking matters anymore.”

She buried her mouth in the heel of her palm, taking a deep breath as he stared at her, shocked and silent.

“I wanted to fix where I went wrong. I wanted to be the person who would see you, would go to you this time.”

“By controlling it. By picking what I wear and what I’m doing and who I’m with. Don’t you see how fucked up that is? You only get to be as strange and brilliant and terrible and wild as you’re meant to be,” she shook her head sadly at him, “and pretending you’re something you’re not is a crime against everything I ever saw in you.”

She left him in the threshold of his apartment to change.

He had stashed her clothes in his room. She took off her coat and steadily began to pull the clothes he had bought off her body.

The nakedness was not for him, or even for herself, and he didn’t feel it inside him the way the flashing teases of skin he’d gotten before had done. Instead her stripping shame only doubled his.

He hovered in the doorway, staring at the rug that she’d stuck a lion head on him and he’d growled and wrestled her like her tamed beast.

“You said it best. I can’t...I can’t keep throwing money at things just because I’m lonely, Rey.”

She closed her eyes. Her hands going still as they were drawing her blouse across her chest.

“So you’re ending it. This. Between us.”

She didn’t sound as free or relieved as he had thought she would. But it felt like the right thing to do. He was too broken.

“I think that without the money,” he lifted his eyes to hers, “I don’t want you to put up with me without compensation. I’m too fucked up.”

She crossed her arms, her brows rising angrily.

“Who says it has to be monetary compensation?”

“What else can I give you--?”

“What else?”

Her freckled cheeks were red with fury. She struggled to button up her blouse.

“How about you fucking love me, for a start?”

His tongue froze against the roof of his mouth.

“Rey…”

“It’s not that hard,” she huffed defensively, “to just be together. Is it? Is it for you? You’ve made something impossible that never had to be.”

She took his hesitation as immediate rejection. Her face hardened. It was her clever choice to disguise that she had begun to cry by standing to leave.

“Rey, wait.”

“This should have been done over a lunch,” she was grabbing her coat off the bed, “a business lunch to part ways amicably. I hate leaving your apartment angry, I’m not even your girlfriend--”

He grabbed her elbow before she could storm out of the room.

“Rey, don’t. Rey.”

He cradled her stiff body to his chest. He felt her warmth. He knew it in his heart that this was it: if she left him, he’d die.

He was shaking.

“Please.”

She didn’t move. Did not speak with the voice that was supposed to guide him home. He planted kiss after kiss up and down to column of her throat. She remained unswayed, though fidgeting under his lips as though beginning to feel conflict.

“Speak to me. Your words.”

All he needed was her voice no matter what it said.

“The night we almost met didn’t matter,” she had tears in her eyes, “because do you remember the one where we did?”

Her ugly scarf, the winter cold, Freder shoving his dirty fingers into his own mouth. It was an odd night. A night where he felt too strange for her, examined, cut open.

He had blocked it from his mind because the feeling he’d had when he met her wasn’t a comfortable one. One where he risked being annihilated on sight because he had to risk for his reward.

“I approached you,” she murmured, looking out the glassy, neon-flecked window, “I approached you because I wanted to talk to you.”

He just wanted her to keep talking. Like before.

But he knew what she was saying. She walked up to him and struck up a conversation, and he didn’t even know what it meant. He shoved money at her instead of getting her number, or taking Freder back to the library, or being vulnerable for even a second: he made rules that didn’t need to exist and made into the rhythm of a fairy tale so the circles would take them back to each other when life got in the way. He didn’t allow what was happening between them to live.

It was too scary to risk it. So he kept her there by choking her.

"I'm sorry," he finally answered, "I'm sorry. You deserved to have me try."

"I wanted to be close to you and this is what you offered and I accepted," she whispered in the softest voice he had ever heard "why couldn't you believe I would want to be close to you without your money?"

He buried his face in her shoulder. Bending his hulking form around her smaller body. She was trembling.

But he was trembling harder.

“There’s something wrong with me.”

“I know,” she put her hands over his, “and it’s wrong with me too. We’re lonely. I said it the first night I spoke to you. Maybe I didn’t see you in the gemstone room before that. Maybe you did see me, and didn’t care. But we found each other when we found each other, and if it meant taking your money even though I hated it…”

She gasped when his arms tightened around her.

“I love you, Rey.”

She was limp against him at the words, his mouth pressed to her throat. Like this, he could devour her. Like this, he never would. His empress.

"Anything you want you can have," he pleaded into her neck, hot tears beading against her skin. "just don't leave me."

To be asked seemed to be what broke this awful spell. She went limp in his grasp. 

"I just want you," she turned on her tiptoes to kiss his lips, slicked with fallen tears. He kissed her hungrily and she kissed him gently. She kissed him. 

He could erect no more rules between them when only their own wildness would suit.

And when she spoke his name aloud again he was finally turned back into a man.

“I love you, Ben.”

Freder pressed his hands onto Rey’s round belly curiously: the bump stretching out under a yellow sweater as she broke a cookie into pieces for him to snack on. The cafe was bustling with after school stops at this time of day, the light coppery and cheerful around them. This was the feeling without the pain that mirrored it, the feeling he had sought for so long. 

It was finally real.

Ben hovered, as he did every moment since she announced their baby to him, like a lion protecting his pride.

Freder was endlessly curious about the baby. He would hover his face, sometimes pressing his nose in, so close to Rey’s belly that Ben was nervous they were have some kind of psychic communion together, his unnamed child and his godson. Rey was good-natured as ever about it, and answered all of Freder’s endless questions, and didn’t let her husband do even a fraction for her that he wanted to.

Since she graduated, all she wanted to do was write. Sometimes she let him read it. 

Sometimes, with plying, he was able to get her to read it to him.

Outside the cafe on the walk home, Freder almost darted off into the street again.

“Hold my hand,” Ben called out, extending his fingers. Freder, too old and sophisticated to be babied, but too chaotic and unpredictable to not be supervised, looked petulant but clasped hands with his godfather anyway.

His wife was at his side, all of them waiting at the stoplight for it to change. 

"Just quietly," she whispered in his ear for no reason other than to please him.

Rey's little hand slithered into his, and her belly brushed his arm, and he shivered with a pleasure deep enough to split bone. 

Chapter Text

The typewriter is here in the room with me—I hold on to it as the sensible sailor holds on to his compass. . . What I am conscious of, is of having the sense of true perspective. . . that is in fact only the consciousness of impending, imminent revelation. “I can see.” But “I can see” is not to say ‘I see.’ I don’t believe at all in revelations—but to have, even for a minute, the sense of impending revelation, that is being alive.

Maeve Brennan

Somnambulist: n. sleepwalker. 

He glitters over her, obsidian and sleek, like the black king of a chess set.

His hair drips through her fingers: he likes to take a shower after work before he comes to her. The droplets wetting the silk over her belly air-cooled and shocking. His skin sleek and warm and new.

All hers.

Ben slides a knee between her legs to lean over her for his kiss in greeting. He is gently, unobtrusively, amused to find her stretched out in bed, already asleep, but her body reacts to his presence in the room when he seems more intent to delay the announcement of his arrival to kiss her awake.

It doesn’t work, her eyes fly open too soon, and she gets to see his slow descent as he pushes the silky camisole of her pajamas up her belly and plants slow kisses down her flat stomach. Not as flat as it was once was, living off of soup and ramen, now that he feeds her everything he thinks she deserves. She had to beg off the overwhelming feasts a few weeks into a proper courtship, and he has been more thoughtful to be balanced in the diet he was trying to provide her, but there’s no defeating the dragon that is his spoils.

She had joked several times that he was fattening her up to eat her.

It’s not a bad change, his lips working against the soft flesh with a smile, teething under her navel in light pinches. With his head bowed over her, the inky strands prick against her skin.

There’s a tug and a slight, pert sound of a single stitch ripping on her pajamas. She, a practical being, hisses through her teeth. But of course the silk would rip under his hand, it’s fluid as a malleable rain puddle that he lifts to spill and drape over her body as he chooses.

“Don’t wear such flimsy things to bed,” he chides, tugging the silk shorts that he bought for her, “don’t you know the creature you married?”

The implication that he simply could not control himself over her sleeping form does her in. He could nibble on her lying lax for hours: but now she is properly sparked.

Rey finally stirs and combs her fingers into his hair when he lowers the waistband of her pajamas and sucks on the sensitive skin above her mound.

“Don’t hold back on my account,” he growls, a tongue dipping out to taste her. It finally sings through her.

He’s home.

Then she flinches, bucks, wriggles.

Then she comes alive.  

She looks up from her book, a slim window of time faltering marked with a pause as glaring as a violin bow scratching a wrong note over the strings.

Ben is watching her from the edge of the shelves with Freder dangling from his hand. He looks pleased with himself to have made her blush.

She doesn’t let it break her concentration, but a smile does grace her lips when she stops to turn the page. Then, the picture book foisted up like a flag is panned towards the children at her feet, and she continues her story.

Her husband looking impossible sharp and handsome in his suit as he watches her through the shelves.

The library is of what little remains from her life before marriage.

It’s not marriage to blame for that. Her life before marriage was that of a student, and then for a slim window a recent graduate, and from that she became a wife.

She finishes the story with a flourish, always Ferdinand, and muffled, she can hear Freder recite along with her in his stubborn mutter of a voice.

She watches her husband shiver behind a bookshelf. It’s not as visceral as it once was, but still powerful. It’s like her ties to him are not external bonds, but a manipulation from the inside of both of them.

She always feels powerful when she reads to him, but she didn’t know she’d opened this book to have him listening.

“I didn’t think you’d be coming,” she smiles into a kiss on her cheek, Ben bowing dutifully to deliver it to her, Freder growling from the floor and climbing up her legs.

“Poe had a doctor’s appointment.”

Rey picks up Freder so he stops clawing into her skirt like a hungry cat.

“And I thought we’d go to the zoo,” he says it for Freder’s benefit, but his godson is busy slipping his hand into the loop of hair at the back of Rey’s head like a bracelet.

There went her afternoon plans.

She chides herself mentally, because on paper, she’d rather do this. But it’s not about what activity weighs heavier in the form of enjoyment. Her time is her only real luxury, at least an earned one, and when disrupted or taken, like it has been now, she feels the theft to her core. It’s been teritorial since they married, instead of peaceful inside.  

Ben used to pay dearly for her time. Because of him, and because of the weight of her last semester being lifted by more than his money, but he  love and support, she had much more of it.

She could be more generous.

“Freder’s going to get to see real lions today,” she muses, and her husband smiles softly down at her, but there’s a moment where he waits for her to truly smile back and it doesn’t come, and she sees his eyes widen nervously when the desired expression is not given to him. He’s gotten better at not just tossing something sparkly at her feet to try and beg one off of her; he tries to earn every one, and this is making him nervous to fail.

She supposes she just forgot to smile.

Her husband has not successfully hidden his affection for her sleeping body.

She thought it was a distinctly male thing, or a phase of infatuation that comes with a newly shared bed, when he would prod his already-hard cock gently into her backside, then insistently, to wake her. It was amusing at first, but she’s a rather pragmatic person, and they spend so much time of the day awake already and she needed her sleep. But once she’s awake, she’s awake, and his body there and ready is too delicious to be denied: though she loves the game of trying to make him think he will be.

He never is, but he’d never act like he knew that.

There’s something charming about stunts he pulls just to get what he wants from her

Most of the time she huffs and rolls onto her belly or back, depending on how they naturally came together to sleep, and allows him to work himself inside her body, maybe absently stroking her clit on her own while he moves. This setting for sex wasn’t the height of romance in their marriage, it felt more like using each other in a companionable way, but by the time the sun came up they were cuddled up again like they didn’t become the gruffest, most instinctual forms of themselves in the dark.

Sometimes she thinks about it differently, as though he comes home late from a business trip, irritated and pent up, and he slides into their bed to torture her with his fingers and mouth and cock, just to be the only person to take the brunt his rage.

It becomes a glimmer of hope inside her that she wakes up to roughness, her heart racing in her chest, and he declares an ownership of her he’s been shy about.

She sees it when she closes her eyes.

Over and over, she’d clench on him and cry out in the darkness, and his use of her body is explicitly for pleasure, not instinct, indulgence.

It becomes the sacred comfort of their marriage that the waking up is less and less prefaced with conversation.

Sometimes she wakes up with the air leaving her lungs as he lowers himself down to mouth at her neck.

There are mornings where he nuzzles his soft hair between her thighs until her body jerks as she wakes, then he proceeds to lean forward and lick messily until she’s ready to take him.

There are times where she’s warmed up in sleep, rubbing sensually against him, and wakes up with him ready to finish what she started.

She extols upon him, easily falling from her lips, his virtues. Diligent. Attentive. Passionate.

And when he is gone she thinks of vice. If a vice, given selflessly, is even a sin at all.

She’s played her own part of this.

He snuck a few silky, air-light pieces of sleepwear into her wardrobe and then cranks the heat so it’s too hot for sweatshirts and flannels. Everything comes with a use, she’s stubborn enough to sleep in an ugly tee-shirt she received free while volunteering at a library event just to spite him, so while he tries to twist it to practicality, she wears softer and softer silk whispers over her skin only for him to be unable to resist touching her.

And that gray area is in itself a place to wander after he kisses her tenderly before he leaves for work, her left thoughtfully drinking the coffee he brought to their bedside for her, while she has the apartment all to herself.

She likes the gold he’s allowed to permeate his dark, minimalistic aesthetic, and the silver to brighten it. All her additions. Decoration, that’s been a hobby.

She pads around the apartment and considers her contribution, notes the changes in the spaces that looked empty and are now solid. Admiring her handiwork when the geometric lines of art deco that make her feel surrounded by him even when he’s not there.

She sips her coffee pleasantly, thinking about waking up with his cock already inside her. Waking up from her own orgasm taken by him in her sleep. Waking up after he’s finished, no sign of anything but his cum pooling out of her used cunt and a feeling of delicious ache that she missed it entirely.

Depravity and deprivation.

She keeps these thoughts to herself. There’s no way to enter into this safely, she feels too absurd. She was so fierce about belonging to herself before he gave himself to her. She’d woken him up from his fantasy.

It was unfair to drag him too deeply into hers.

“The Canadys want to have dinner.”

She lowers the spine of her book to unveil her eyes to him.

There’s a few slow blinks as this processes.

Ben shifts from one foot to the other in the doorway to the living room. There’s something odd about his nerves in asking.

She closes the book.

“Okay…”

He clears his throat gruffly.

“You don’t have to go just because you’re my wife and you feel like you have to.”

Her eyebrows rise slowly and she draws out her response in confusion.

“Are you only asking me because I’m your wife and you feel like you have to?”

He enters the room, a little braver out of the dark, and seats himself next to her on the couch. It prickles against her skin, the formality. This is their couch. He is her husband. They are to go to dinner with another couple and their own sharedness.

“My mistress is busy that night,” he says lightly, toying with the hands she has rested on her lap. She leans into his shoulder and bites him.

As if that would ever happen.

He nuzzles her, always needing to be closer, and she relaxes when he pulls her legs over his lap. This is easy.

“I suppose you’ll have opinions on what shoes I have to wear.”

Ben was generous with everything: but most satisfying is him learning to be generous with himself.

Once or twice she has woken up, feeling the same twisty lust that curls every muscle in the middle of the night, and rolled towards him to rouse him for her whims. He seems excited to be involved every time, too greedy to miss a single minute, and when her thighs clutch his hips as she sleepily rides him she wonders how he sees this going with his body.

“Fuck, use me,” he answers in a dark purr for her one night, his lovely throat arched as she rolls her hips roughly into him, “I love you, I love you, use me Rey.”

How decadent it feels to have a husband to use. A little too much for her. Too rich. Some ink-black chocolate that deadens the tongue without the right wine to go with it, and she’s never been a creature to know what pairs well with extravagance.

So she nibbles at it.

The next time an erection presses into her ass without an awake husband to go along with it, she rolls over curiously and teases the bulge over his pajamas. He arches into her touch and moans in his sleep.

She gets as far as putting her bare skin to his bare skin when he does wake up: and her hypothesis is accurate. He is pleased, but he is jealous, and feels left out for missing even a moment of what she is doing to him.

He is frantic to catch up to the game instead of a toy to play with.

And he doesn’t need to be anything other than her greedy little boy, not really. She doesn’t mind much, his enthusiasm. When he growls into her throat and pins her, half-feral from sleep-drenched want.

Ben is not doing anything wrong.

He doesn’t need to want her any less.

When they’re both sated, a dim light of a threatening dawn slowly growing, he gives a casual, flung-out, blanket permission that could be too easily abused to wake him up like that whenever she desires. He says it laughingly, a hand flung to his chest like his heart is in danger of giving out, and she curls into his arms when he snuggles her gratefully like she did something for him.

How does she explain the venturing she is doing only for herself?

She used to feel like the only adult in this relationship. But blending their lives impossibly stretches out her small one for his larger one; even the little places she keeps the same are because his wealth can envelope that old life and keep it under glass for her. This is how it works: she was going to feel doubled more than he was going to feel halved.

She is a young wife to him. She has been given the world on a platter. But there was nothing else to be to him, in their oddness, and she feels more natural at that than anything else she’s ever done.

He catches her sleeping on the library rug.

He’s supposed to be at work. Ben rushes home sometimes to surprise her, in some sort of newlywed way, to rush her up against a blank white wall she hasn’t decorated yet and come inside her, grunting and whispering pleas, an animal entering her cage.

She’s a little too bored for her own good. It’s not a bad bored. It’s sort of what she dreamt of doing when she dreamt up a life with a moment of spare time. She reads a lot. When she doesn’t feel like reading she walks around brownstone neighborhoods at odd hours: watching nuns stack donated loaves of bread on folding tables set up on the sidewalk or entire streets of late-opening shops that sit dark and vacant. The doors are protected with a sign saying business hours start at noon with the kind of confidence that some ancient New York City small businesses do when they’re rent-controlled and feel like laughing at God.

Just to spite the only other thing that will also remain forever.

However there is also a lot of napping. It started as recovery from her student life; the wedding was only a step behind graduation, as an end-of-summer afterthought like a mere weekend at the cape.

Weeks following, after squeezing time in with Ben between his work schedule, her pale body slumped around their place as though recovering from a war. Forgetting to change out of what she slept in, which by November after their wedding was a series of tiny slips.

Student life at least always had a future, however short-sighted. Despite the stress and crunches of time being a form of torture, she is unsure how to fill that sense of purpose back even halfway. Her days were stressful but full, routine making her a creature of careful habit to survive. She worked terrible hours. She studied closely to maintain her spot in her program, financial aid the prime motivator. She accepted proposals to do strange things with an odd, lonely man who pierced through her heart from the moment she first saw him.

Who loved her since he first heard her.

Not her like just feels like falling when she’s kicking at monsters that aren’t even there.

It feels like having her curse be broken by someone else and not recognizing where she was.

Now there’s less of an excuse for her aimlessness, and she sleeps a lot during the day. It’s a pleasant, dreamless sleep, like she can flick her eyes open whenever she wants and lowers them to immediately drift back off.

Her husband doesn’t know, or at least to this extent, about all the sleeping.

And then suddenly she’s awake.

“You looked dead for a moment.”

She wakes with him spooned behind her on the floor.

“This is the most comfortable rug I have ever laid on,” he murmurs into her neck, “but it is still a rug, so we probably shouldn’t sleep on it when there’s a bed in the other room.”

He pats her hip gently, as if to guide her up, but she rolls onto her back and looks up at the sloped ceiling instead of following his suggestion.

There are things she can say. That she’s glad to see him. That napping with him on their big, comfortable bed sounds perfect. That she loves her library so much that she didn’t want to move.

But she doesn’t say any of them.

His smile is soft when she does look to the side at him.

“Maybe I want a baby,” she muses instead, staring at the clear light filtering in through the window.

It’s flung out so suddenly, sloppily, that she’s surprised that he can even manage to catch it.

His hand dwarfs the expanse of her pelvis, fingers splayed hip bone to hip bone as he rubs a contemplative circle over her empty belly.

What he is not doing is pouncing on her, fucking her with desperate abandon, and despite being the one to broach the subject she is the one completely confused by it.

“Rey,” his tone is gentle but unamused, “tell me why you want this.”

It’s odd to have him exhibit any restraint now. They’re in her library, he gave it to her, so it feels odd amongst all the books she’ll never have time to read to have him take up a firm hand about this.

She fidgets, pursing her lips, but he catches her feet in his hands and crouches back to sit between them, raised to his shoulders. His thumbs brush along the arches gently.

Her silence speaks volumes.

“Not because you have to convince me,” he keeps working the tendons and little bones. She lets out a soft sigh as he soothes them, warms them up, “we don’t have to worry about me wanting children with you. Ever. I just want to understand why you would want this now.”

Rey arches her back a little.

“I don’t have enough to do--”

He shakes his head, kissing the ball of her right foot.

Wrong answer. Like a riddle.

He seems amused by the conversation, regarding it with none of the reverence she had anticipated.

“Please don’t be one of those bored New York housewives who has a baby just for something to do.”

She glares at him, and he merely smirks down at her.

“What? It’s not you. I’m only telling you now so this doesn’t become something you scream at me about when it’s ten and has a severe wheat allergy. Let’s at least start with a dog.”

“Don’t want a dog,” she answers vaguely.

When she used to say no, it was with fierceness, now it is just petulance, and that irks her more. She digs her nose against her shoulder, looking away from him, as he keeps touching her feet.

He raises his eyebrows and brings the smaller toe next to her big one into his mouth, sucking on the digit very purposefully until he sets it free into the cold air. She’s not one for having her feet touched, but when Ben makes the contact so warm in comparison to going without it’s just not fair.

He has a way of making her crave it.

“Have you--”

The question, the tone that comes with it, makes both of them tense. His tone grows even more sheepish, but he still soldiers through it with a quiet voice.

“--have you been looking for work?”

No, she has not.

“I’m fine with supporting you,” he continues, his tone light and calm, “that’s fine. I just know you get bored.”

“I know,” she stares at the ceiling. Of course he knows.

Of course she knows.

“How about something literary? We can get you on the writing scene, make some donations to the right clubs…”

He closes his eyes as he thinks, pressing his lips to the ticklish arch of her feet.

“I don’t want to go shopping for hobbies,” she huffs, kicking her feet free from his gentle kisses.

His eyes are pinning her to the rug.

“Then what do you want?”

It’s not an overwhelming un -satisfaction, but a nagging one. It just bothers her like a splinter or a blister on the heel: she’s well, she’s perfectly fine, but that one sore spot is the only thing she can think about. However small.  

Ben bends to pepper kisses around the straps on her shoulders. She arches into him. There is something obscene about a cock that is that hard for her stretching under dress pants, nudging against her body.

“Maybe I wanted you to come find me like this,” she puts her hands on his own shoulders, his work shirt all taut crispness over his muscles, and coos when he sucks at the junction of her shoulder, “and take me this way before I even opened my eyes.”

He lifts his head from her body and gazes into her eyes.

“You want that?”

More than a baby, at any rate, she just thought that one would be easier to plead off of him. Instead of this. This thing she can only talk about coyly.

Rey nods.

He crooks a wicked smile, parting her thighs to lie down between, before fucking her on the admittedly not-that-comfortable library rug.

In the fairy tale, the beauty doesn’t wake from a kiss. And it’s not a spindle that pricks her, it’s a thorn. No, flax. It pricks and stays lodged in her finger.

But she’s kissed anyway, alone in her castle, while she slumbers. The prince visits her often in this state.

She bears the prince twins in her sleep.

It is only until one of the sons wants to nurse that the infant’s suckling mouth pulls the flax grain from her skin and she wakes.

It’s horrifying, a girl in a seminar with her commented, wrinkling her pierced nose. These stories are so problematic.

She said it in that imperious tone that meant they should not be spoken of ever again; having mightily declared it too archaic to be part of the foundation of a story, an incarnation that should burn to ashes as though that didn’t stop the very evolution of it into something else entirely.

Literature was built on a bound collection of horrible things.

You have to think of the perspective, the professor argued, these were stories were adapted and popularized to teach lessons to children. She uses the spindle despite being forbidden from touching one for her own protection: disobedience breeds chaos.

The original one was a bit more nihilistic, Rey pointed out quietly. The King is married when he impregnates Sleeping Beauty, and his wife bakes the twins into a pie and feeds it to him.

That nose wrinkle again.

And Disney made kids’ movies out of this stuff.

Rey traced a circle on the table in front of her.

Did they? I wasn’t aware that anyone ever made a movie about it.

But the joke fell on deaf ears at the time.

I think it’s kind of soothing, said Rey, a student about to graduate who knew nothing of her place in this world on the other side, who was tired of working so hard, who would have liked to have woken up one day to just be already in the middle of her destiny, I think the lack of control might be tempting, to have the matter settled for you, after years of waiting to just wake up where you were meant to be.

But it’s just a story.

When Ben is restless, she curls behind him on their sides and cards her fingers into his pretty hair and reads aloud from Grimm’s Fairy Tales until he goes to sleep. It always knocks him right out.

Filled with jealousy, she sometimes puts her hands on his throat to feel him swallow the tension away, to feel his breathing slow.

But with her in his bed every night, he seems to need it less and less. She is his comfort, her voice a smaller part of that now that he is in possession with the rest of her body. Instead he presses his nose into her hair and spoons her. She tries not to wiggle in his grasp, because he does sleep so deeply and she doesn’t want to ruin the rest he’s gotten. If not, there’s still his cure.

She hasn’t found hers yet. She doesn’t know how to bring words to it.

There is a guilty appeal to the idea of opening her eyes and knowing exactly what path she is one whether she chose it or not. Sometimes when he leaves for work she lies back and puffs out her stomach and pretends that this is what she’s meant to do, and she knows it as soon as she opens her eyes to see herself filled by his seed.

Finn and Poe always talk about fulfillment when it comes to parenthood. Knowing smiles and things Ben and Rey just-wouldn’t-understand. She can melt into that. Serene smiles. Providing milk. A diaper bag slung over her shoulder.

Lose herself.

Taking care of Ben is not that different than being a mother to a toddler. Maybe he doesn’t want her to get pregnant because it would usurp him in her attentions. And he does a good job of filling that void. She teases him about practically sucking his thumb when she reads to him, but she gives him plenty else to suck on either way.

So she licks her lips and reads about sleeping beauties with him cuddled like a tamed lion on her lap and lies wide awake late into the night with him dreaming peacefully next to her.

He had promised they’d try it sometime.

Rey props up her feet in the bath and watches her husband move around their room on a terse overseas call. He needs something to fidget with when his temper gets the better of him: she can feel him trying to keep away from a calming activity for her but it breaks when he enters the bathroom and sits at the edge of the tub, phone still pressed to his ear, and massages her feet like he’s working a stress ball in his hand.

She has to keep from moaning loudly; but otherwise it works for both of them. His hands aren’t shaking anymore by the time he hangs up. She’s calmer than ever when he smiles down at her and lets his shoulders sag slightly, relieved, and lets her swim over to him and rest her dripping head on his thigh so that he combs through the slick waves.

Those dress pants against her cheek lend an air of absolute authority. He’s not a sad, lost child needing a story to go to sleep.

He’s her tamed lion.

They have changed each other, and that wonderful, but did she make the change knowing what he’d become or

She moans when his fingers work a particular tense spot against her skull.

“Are you relaxed?” he dotes quietly, fingers digging tenderly into her scalp in gentle rubs, “do you think you’ll go right to sleep?”

He’s so tender and curious, excited.

It’s not that simple, she wants to say, but bites her thumbnail between her teeth instead, nodding sweetly, and he groans and murmurs things about her soft body.

His smile is slightly knowing that she’s being a rare kind of pliant for him, letting him be the one to care for her for once.

Not for once, she winces internally for the past few months since she has graduated.

He doesn’t mind, but she feels terrible about herself because it’s not like she is his self-selected nanny anymore.

His eyes are kind and benevolent. A king to her rather indulged, kittenish role.

“Would you like me to read to you?” he offers, intentionally, with the tone that he hopes it will arouse her as it does him.

Maybe he finally got his princess.

She wakes too easily. He’s just kissing her thighs when her body pulls her from sleep. It’s so sudden her breath leaves her.

The stir from heady sleep to the plummeting warmth at her sex is like a punch clear in the chest.

For a moment, it’s so good, abrupt in the best way, like jumping into a lake, that she almost just lies there.

But it’s such a rush it’s clear that she’s not going back to sleep.

“I’m-uh--”

His head flies up like she’s going to tell him to stop, like she changed her mind.

“I’m up,” she says instead, lamely, flopping her head back on the pillow like she’s admitting defeat.

They’ve tried everything for the past few weeks. Vitamins, meditation, soothing nature sounds. Nothing makes a sleep so dense that he can’t penetrate through.

She sleeps a lot during the day, but it’s always light, moth-wing-light, and even though Ben puts in the effort to get her relaxed and sleepy--

She feels his relieved and amused exhalation heat her belly.

“You know,” he muses, hands moving up and down her legs soothingly, “you could just pretend to be asleep if that happens. That seems more fun.”

Her fuzzy brain has a moment of crisp honesty, like the early days when he’d try to hand her an unplanned twenty-dollar-bill as a token of his gratitude with both of them feeling distaste for the offering. She is annoyed, and frustrated, that her own body snaps her awake at the lightest touch, and all she wants is for him to make love to her when she is in a depth he can’t reach.

“What if I don’t want to wake up?” she grumbles, and he completely misses the petulance and focuses on the words.

She sees his whole body have a flinch of reaction, and she sits up and places her hands on his shoulders.

“No, Ben,” and a pained whine crawls up from his throat, and she’s shaking her head and putting her arms and legs around him. “I just meant until it’s done. I want to sleep the whole time.”

This does even less to soothe him.

“Do you not…” he bows his head into her embrace, hovering over her and not dropping down into her body as though he can’t bear forcing her to stomach him, “want to be awake when we have sex?”

She should have just kept her mouth shut. It’s clear this has been something he’s been wondering every time she wakes in a huff about how this isn’t working. Instead of softening her body, rolling over, and shutting her eyes tight like she was still asleep.

He was clearly fine with making this a game, but when it’s jaggedly real, she can see him grow uncomfortable.

“That’s not what I’m thinking when we have sex,” she curls her fingers into his hair, pulling him down to rest his body over hers.

He’s still rigid. She’s scared she’s broken her husband. Brand-new, out-of-the-box, like a child with a toy they don’t know the value of.

She is in haste to explain herself, words that never even came freely in her own mind in a way that made sense:

“There’s just sometimes when I think about you taking me like that and I…”

She feels him stretching, trying to reach the understanding of her explanation, and that’s when her resolve snaps.

“I just want you to take care of me.”

He burrows down against her, now focused on a point of light through the tunnel.

Ben can work with that request, and her love for him overcomes her disappointment for a moment. It’s not his fault, it’s her own, and he’s being so good.

“Take care of you?” he’s combing some hair out of her face that must have fallen there when he...moved her. When she had briefly nodded off.

Rey shivers at the thought: nothing wrong, but out of place. Just off enough.

“Mhmm,” she tilts her head coyly at him hovering protectively over her, “just until I wake up. I want to feel you...and wonder what you did.”

“So…” there’s a little fracture of understanding in his eyes. Greedy. Dark. Hungry. “So it’s all up to me?”

They are keeping her old apartment.

He wanted it gone from her life; but she wanted it. It was cozy. Maybe not in the days when it was her only option -it was a hovel but it was home when she had no other options- but it was her first home she made for herself.

“For storage,” she attempted lamely, almost too shy to issue a direct command, maybe because it was such a ridiculous one.

Ben was sitting on the edge of the bed beside her when they talked about it, buttoning up the shirt he selected for work. A black so deep she suspected it she reached for him, she could put a hand right through him into dark abyss.

He had looked over his shoulder at her. His expression hopeful.

“Maybe...you can use it as a place to go write.”

That had been a thing for her to do, hadn’t it?

She blocks out the image of that vulnerable look in his eyes from when he agreed she keep this place as she unlocks the door. The elevator’s working these days, more people are moving into the empty apartments in a place once deemed too inconvenient for everyone but the most desperate people before.

She still pointedly uses the stairs.

She forgets the stairs are a little bit of a liability.

She misses that door only whenever it’s right in front of her. The not-cream, not-green, not-white paint on the molding slathered in carelessly thick layers, so that the chips in the paint from before just pock the texture in deep canyons.

But this was how it worked, wasn’t it? You go somewhere larger, not smaller, when you get married?

She sheds her coat onto the dusty side-table. Not a lot came out of this place to follow her to Ben’s larger apartment. Maybe more should have.

Her sapphire ring glitters at her, scratching the skin of her cheek as she brushes a curl out of her eye.

She feels like she is entering somewhere no one had visited in a hundred years.

Her husband doesn’t know where she is.

She’s not doing anything morally wrong: but the flicker in her belly that he doesn’t know, he can’t have all of her right now, is a delicious one.

But she feels rather petulant and boring in her futile rebellion: to have come all this way to take a nap in her old bed.

He prepares the milk for her with the precision of a chemist.

While he does it, she plays with the cactus she gave him: slowly stabbing a spike into the tip of her finger.

He doesn’t like to talk about work, or coworkers he knows she won’t like, but he found the doctor through Canady and he wants to be the one to administer the dosage. It gives him a sense of peace. They were both at the appointment, Rey talking about general feelings while Ben was firm about safety and planning.

He’s a good negotiator of terms. What she cannot have, what they cannot do: he accepts and stores away. But the careful nudging towards whatever you want to do seems to scare him a little. She doesn’t know or want to know what to expect, but he’s shy without clear direction.

She putters around the kitchen barefoot while he stares at the sleeping pills, swallowing thickly in afterthought, until she comes up behind him and wraps her arms around his waist.

“I’m trying to be fair,” he almost laughs at himself, “we did my thing; now we’re doing yours.”

She presses a kiss to the back of his shoulder, then before he can say anything more, reaches for the glass and downs her milk.

She looks down and the pricked finger is bleeding.

“Carry me to bed?” she requests quietly, and her limbs are good at pretending to go limp when he folds her chivalrously up in his arms.

Rey wakes to the crinkling of parchment paper: a bouquet of pink roses in stark black wrapping welcomes her back to her state of consciousness.

Her mouth feels terribly dry.

Her thighs sort of tremble when she moves to sit up. Muscles straining.

But nothing is terribly out of place.

Ben holds the flowers over her, fully dressed, and that slim advantage over her current state almost knocks her down into the bed. He’s in a sweater and slacks and she’s in the silk nightgown she wore to bed; vulnerable, pale, soft.

And yet he looks ready to confess everything at her feet.

She raises one eyebrow. A smirk pulls her lips to one side.

“Does whatever you did to me really call for flowers?”

He shivers above her, his large hands white and anxious.

“Do you want me to tell you?”

She didn’t, but he seems  to need to confess. If they did this again, he’d need to feel comfortable, so she nods and he kneels by her side of the bed.

She considers the roses with a small smile. He really brought her flowers…

“You can tell me if you want,” she nods her head imperiously, and he’s crouched at the side of the bed immediately. She strokes his black hair between her fingers.

“We just had sex,” he stutters, his lids low over his eyes at her touch, her fingers combing soothingly down to his scalp, “a few times. It was slower than normal. I don’t know. I liked it. I felt odd. Like I was using sex to try and reach you.”

“Hmm,” she scratches his head absently, her lids still slightly heavy.

“What?”

His nerves snap quickly at any vagueness from her.

“I just didn’t picture you fighting the...sleeping part,” she lowers her eyes.

He doesn’t like this. Greedy, his hand seizes her chin and lifts her gaze to him.

“What do you mean?”

“That you’d like the control. To have me completely at your mercy. Not that your first instinct was to try to wake me up.”

She bites her lip. This shouldn’t have to be so psychological. But isn’t this what she made him do, when it was his thing they were trying? Slicing his psyche open and examining the guts spilled across the table?

She flushes as he bends closer, rubbing the tip of his nose against hers. The bridge then slots at an angle, bringing their brows gently together.

“Wouldn’t taking care of you,” he whispers against her lips, “mean trying everything to wake you up?”

That delicious soreness  squeezes like a python inside her. She smiles faintly.

“Did you really try everything?” she whispers back, asking for his secrets, and for a moment of clarity her love for this man warms her down to her bones.

Humor slowly warms his expression.

“When I make my wife cum that many times: I’d like her to be able to thank me for it.”

Rey interlaces her fingers the back of his neck.

“Thank you,” she kisses him gratefully.

She makes the sloppy mistake of going to her apartment before they’re supposed to meet the Canadys.

She wakes up from her nap with a bleary, swollen feeling, and curses at the time listed on the clock. She doesn’t even grab anything to leave. She just races home.

“Where were you?”

Ben hasn’t quite lot his patience, but he’s clearly agitated. He’s like a child and the world is big and cruel to him: he has to be at dinner with one of the higher-ups and his little fool wife is missing. She rubs her eyes with the heel of her hand as she tears over to the closet.

This way they can at least pretend when he hands her something to wear it’s just to account for her lateness, not like he’d purchased these items for this evening.

When she looks in the mirror, there are still pillowcase creases indented on her cheek. Somehow this feels as incriminating as a love bite, despite there being no affair.

She yawns as he pulls up her zipper.

“Rey,” he breathes into her shoulder. “Where were you?”

She forgot she didn’t answer the first time.

“I lost track of time,” she swivels on her heels to stare up at her looming, wonderful husband. He looks concerned. Not about dinner. But about her being lost.

She presses a kiss to his lips.

“I’m sorry, Ben,” she means it, picking up a necklace placed on her vanity by him and holds the unfastened ends behind her neck, close enough to bind.

He takes his cue. He’s frightfully good at that.

His large fingers carefully set the clasps into place.

“So have you two thought about having children?”

Rey almost chokes on her glass of wine.

Ben lets her squirm for that one. Only that one. He smiles at her around his next bite.

“We’ve discussed it, but not for a little while,” she says quietly with a smile to Unamo, who has dark-lined eyes and a lot of rings and a jagged edge that she’s been filing down with vodka and ice since they all sat down.

Moden snorts, sawing into his steak, and states this as fact as a pool of blood fills his plate:

“Kylo’s not ready.”

She tries not to flinch at the name. It’s very abrupt to her. As is the pretense of knowing Ben more deeply than she does.

Unamo is rattling ice in her glass with she’s rolling die in a cup.

“You can’t fault them for not going through with it when they’re not ready, it’s better than the alternative…”

“You were ready--”

“--I was saying that there’s time. But don’t wait too long--”

“--nasty miscarriage after thirty-five--”

Rey isn’t sure if this is a personal or statistical example because the Canadays are now speaking around each other, all at once, and she and Ben must lock eyes with one of them or the whole evening with melt away like sugar.

“--Anyway, we are both so happy for you,” Unamo smiles in a way that only moves the bottom portion of her face, “your wedding was so beautiful. Like a fairy-tale.”

Rey smiles demurely at this. She quite liked her wedding.

And Ben’s shy smile warms her from the seat beside her at the mention of it.

“It was so elegant. That tiara you were wearing--”

Rey looks down at her lap.

It was Ben’s grandmother’s; the only way he would ever be able to get her to wear it was the personal significance, even if it was the most beautiful thing she’d ever seen. Two arching wings of diamonds extending out of the crown. It was called The Valkyrie. Vintage Cartier from the 1930’s.

It was actually for the best to be placed on her head because looking straight at it made her have to hold her breath.

The wedding was the first time Rey had realized that Ben was not just accomplished in money but moneyed. He’d grown up on it, like an island isolated deep in the center of the sea with little warmth or interaction.

He’d grown cold out on the island, on an island, even if he’d escaped the one he’d been raised on. Before they found each other.

Had she helped him escape, or were they on the island together?

“You know it is actually quite a famous piece,” Unamo says with no small underlying meaning, “you snagged a catch; I’m sure there’s a lot of little girls who want a wedding exactly like yours.”

“Big girls, too,” Moden adds: but it reads as more like a jab to someone who isn’t Rey who is obviously at the table.

What Rey remembers of her wedding was her vintage drop-waist dress, which she loved because it was light as air and loose enough that she could still eat plenty of cake. She remembers what a lovely September day it was, and the richness of the earth up North at his family’s lake house, and her husband and his many, many indulgent kisses that day.

There’s a flare of emotion in Unamo’s eyes that make her smile, while unaltered, seem to bear a crack like a fracture through glass.

“I felt like a princess at my wedding,” she leans back in her seat, “but that’s why fairy tales never show you the marriage.”

Ben had implied a warning of topics of this nature, the Canadys were ‘rocky’ now, but he’s the one who stiffens beside her at the table when Rey just purses her lips sympathetically.

That was a move with Ben, back when he was Kylo, that worked. Instead of snapping back at him, and she did a good deal of that as well, she just sits back and let the tension slack instead of snap. He’d either talk out what he needed to get out or he’d give up when he wasn’t getting the guidance or permission he wanted from her.

Unamo’s eyes flicker like she wants to be asked a question, but returns to her vodka with a slight snarl curling one nostril.

Ben launches into a funny story about a client involving drinking too much, and all the funny stories about work in his business involve drinking too much, while they nurse their only glasses of wine for the night and the Canadys laugh and get as drunk as the subject of the story.

Plates are cleared. She flinches at the clatter of them together as the waiter whisks them away over her shoulder; more sensitive to minute sounds after an hour of drowning out the conversation.

She reaches for the dessert menu that’s handed to her, and there’s an abrupt sound from both the Canadys like a baby made a cute face and should be cooed at.

She freezes, her hand clasped around the leather binding.

Ben’s hand secures on her back, supportively, but she’s still not sure what she did wrong.

“I’m sorry,” she tries to hand it back to the waiter, “I didn’t mean--”

“No, if she wants dessert, she can get a dessert,” Unamo says through a brittle smile, “I’ll look, but I truly cannot order anything.”

Rey’s eyes just shoot forward to the flickering candle at the center of the table.

Ben rubs soothingly.

“I was taking a look myself over her shoulder,” he says easily. “So I’m sure I’ll be having a bite of whatever she chooses.

She knows he was lying. He’ll have a bite to save face for her.

Her hands ball into fists on her lap.

Canady waves her on.

“Rey, order whatever you like.”

But it’s an allowance being made for her, like a child. She bites her tongue.

Ben indulges her. Her resistance for it had weakened. She finally gave him permission to give her gifts when it felt like they were truly in love: but they had to matter. It isn’t a suggestion when it matters. He took that to heart. It was a sign he did know her, and he hadn’t failed her yet. He spent so long working on her library. All things considered, many of the books were already hers. It was more about the place for them, and the books he did pick. He didn’t wave a credit card at a generic store and haul them thoughtlessly at her feet.

This single dessert was a petty indulgence from the Canadys. Singling her out because she did something she wasn’t supposed to and treated like she was stupid. Ben could cleverly hide it all he wanted.

She orders a flourless chocolate cake and pushes it around the plate. It’s too dense. Ben chivalrously eats almost all of it for her. She is asked by both Moden and Unamo how she likes it about a dozen times.

She hardens herself to the jabs and just nods stupidly, serenely. At a certain point Ben is holding her hand under the tablecloth. Soon, every squeeze promises, soon.

He looks more uncomfortable than she does. He has to do this: it’s part of his job, and in having to has now forced her.

She can wait, can go back to waiting, now that she has woken up to find her life has started without her.

Moden is too drunk to notice how far his voice travels. They’ve gotten looks from neighboring tables all evening. It’s worse once they’re standing, walking out, at a higher level than the remaining diners.

Ben is helping Rey into his coat when Canady claps his associate on the back with so much force she feels it through him. Rey doesn’t turn around. Presumably this is why he speaks so loudly:

“How’s the old itch going, Ren?”

Rey adjusts the sparkling bracelet Ben gave her before they left tonight. Diamond over black velvet ribbon, invoking, or more likely even from, the Belle Epoque.

It’s something so lovely it makes her afraid. On the walk here she was seized with the urge to fling it into the gutter.

“Fine,” she can sense his obvious discomfort. “Just fine.”

“Well, I hope the card I gave you was what you were truly looking for. And that you didn’t lose it. You don’t marry an itch, you understand? The key to any happy marriage.”

Her hands shake a little when she fastens her coat. She’s not thinking deeply on this. She’s thinking on the walk to the train in heels, because she doesn’t want to take a cab and watch the money pile up in red lines on the meter, and she’d insisted to Ben that she wouldn’t need to get a taxi.

Ben doesn’t answer Canady, instead bends his knees to tenderly press his lips to her downturned chin, cuddling her almost defiantly as she buttons up.

His itch.

She brews her milk concoction while he takes too long hanging up his coat, nervous and awkward.

On the counter rests a piece of chocolate cake, fluffy with that kind of frosting that had a faint crunch to it, that Ben had stubbornly bought for her on the walk home.

The plastic container glittered at her.

She turned her back on it to water the cactus.

He had yet to release any sign of his feelings on how this evening went, but with her hand coiled up in his large one, he was firm about one thing. He led her to a diner open late with a shining illuminated dessert case muttering we’re getting you a proper dessert.

I’m not very hungry.

It’s better than what was at that place. Did they use a thimble for the cake mould?

That slice looked so good. Like cake was supposed to look. A slightly moist sheen to the cake itself, the frosting with a bit of a stiff crunch to it instead of just a wet layer of ganache.

It cost her husband three dollars and it was the single most romantic gesture anyone had ever made for her. She cradled it to her chest the entire walk home.

They were both silent in the elevator until they were almost at their floor.

“Are you alright?” he had breathed finally, looking at her wine-flushed face intently.

Her head was tilted back into the mirrored wall of the lift. She missed the small pleasure of being able to take the stairs when you’re angry, the rush of it, but that was impossible when they lived so high up in the tower.

“I’m a little shell-shocked,” she had admittedly quietly, in a near whisper, and he firmly kissed her at the center of her brow.

“They’re not happy,” he shook his head to himself, seeming to regret exposing her to this, “not like us.”

Happy.

She spins her spoon through the milk and powder, listening to him stall by the door. When he enters, he seems caught off guard.

“What?” She doesn’t even glance up, “milk goes good with cake.”

He sees right through the coyness and reserve.

“I don’t know if I feel like...tonight…”

She lifts her eyes.

"What itch?"

He closes his mouth for a moment. A sad, tired sigh leaves his nose.

"Before," he shuts his eyes, "after we met, before I had you read to me...I truly tried everything."

The milks films dry over her tongue. She tries to swallow the phlegmy glob of it. Suppresses a gag. 

He can't look at her. 

"There was an escort, once. I had her read to me."

Rey nods.

He expects her to be angry. In his confusion, he certainly made a mistake pursuing that, but he was so ashamed and uncomfortable when he came back to her...

She furrows her brow and takes another sip of the milk.

"Just read?"

He shook his head.

"It wasn't working. I got aggressive. I didn't know what I wanted."

"Do you still have her card?" she tilts her face towards the counter, "like Canady said."

Fuck he whispers under his breath.

"No," he tells her clearly, his eyes narrowed, "why would I need her card?"

He's disgusted. Not defensive. Open. Searching her for a sign of doubt instead of trying to convince her of dismissing it. 

She stabs into the cake with a fork.

"It wasn't what I needed," he sounds horrified, "you were what I needed."

"I believe you," she says finally, surprised with herself. 

"Never, Rey," he's saying to himself, repeating, "never."

"I believe you," she repeats, kicking off her shoes, settling onto a stool at the kitchen island. She points to the milk with a limp finger, "This is starting to work."

"Rey..." he looks at her, confused, "this doesn't seem like the best time."

She tosses her fork in the sink and wanders to bed, dreamily.

“Do whatever you feel like. I want to sleep.”

She feels the matter settle into an odd sense of quiet, it honestly scares her a little to see him looking at her from the door of the bedroom with fear in his eyes.

But when they curl into bed, he places a hand on her thigh.

“Tell me not to.”

She rolls towards him, her brow furrowing.

“Why?”

Ben swallows. He’s not Kylo, though she saw glimmers under Canady’s rough jokes, the friction creating the spark that was Kylo. He is her husband now, gentle, a little too doting, deeply in love with her.

“Because I want to be with you, I want to make you feel good, but I want…”

“You can be,” she closes her eyes stubbornly, “this is what I want.”

Ben kisses the base of her throat.

"Do you want to?" she says clearly, suddenly fearing sleep because she doesn't want to lose control if he does something he doesn't want to do.

"Yes," he says, his hands on her hips, touching her like he doesn't want to hurt her with a hunger he can't control, "is that wrong?"

"No," she arches her neck into the pillow with him above her, "I want it too."

She sees it, in their strange ability to almost read each other’s minds now that the haze of infatuation has lifted, that he has reached a bit of a breaking point here. That he was so happy for her to start wanting things from him that he didn’t seem to know when to stop, and might just be thinking about stopping.

Not yet her mind pleads.

But that’s barely a musing before her body feels heavy.

“Rey?”

Her eyes flutter open. She feels strange. Like it shouldn’t have been that easy to wake her up. Like she knows an hour ago it would have been near impossible.

From the light in the room, it is much, much later in the day than she anticipated.

Ben is crouched at her side, a hand gentle on her, his expression worried.

She sits up and there’s an eerily pleasurable sensation of slickness exiting her cunt when she moves. The inside of her body is warm, actively warm, and she was clearly dead asleep for most of the evening.

She arches her spine and feels that thick slip of his cum out of her channel and down her thighs. Curious fingers draw through the puddle he has created under her ass. Shiny and milky. She rolls it between her fingers, licking it off like cream.

Her mouth quirks up in a smile.

“What do you want to do now that I am awake?” she husks, dark satisfaction making her body curve towards him.

His eyes flutter and he swallows. His bare knee lifts onto the mattress. He crawls towards her.

“Lick it out of you.”

She grabs at his legs as he tries to crawl to her.

“Your turn,” she tilts her head temptingly at him.

There’s a lightness, and giddiness, and he seems struck dumb by the small smile on her face as she caresses his thighs.

She lies facing the foot of the bed. He stretches out beside her with his head by the pillows, but only until he lifts her and parts her thighs to get his mouth in between. It takes some figuring out but he manages to push his hips out enough and curl his stomach so she can get her mouth on him too when she rests alongside him.

She just wants him.

Fuck, he tastes like her cunt.

Her thighs shake around his ears so quickly. Too quickly. He’s still eating his fill of everything he’s stuffed inside her while she slept.

His cock is hard and red, and keeps slipping from her lips as he greedily hauls her towards him.

“Ben,” she wiggles, her thighs held open under his snapping jaw. He’s beastly like this, maybe because she’s awake and responding now, building off the events he put into play last night, “I want to get closer.”

He’s too focused to recognize the request. His tongue laps his cum out of her and rolls it against her clit. Her muscles jerk as he works against her. She can kiss and kitten-lick his swollen cockhead; but that’s all this position allows.

“You are close,” he tells her in an un-indulgent tone.

He bows his head and laps at her like he’s grooming her. She hisses, tries to mouth at him, settles for using her hands. Even if it’s not ideal, she finds herself looking at his bare legs, down the trunks of them, to his feet.

This as a vantage point is a strange place to be, especially with this part of him she’s never looked at very closely (there is a big point of distraction currently under her chin).

She stares dumbly at his flexing thighs as he works her into a shivering mess, then sucks on her, then fills her with his tongue.

It’s when she learns she loves looking at his sculpted legs that she shatters around him.

He dips her back, hunching over dangerously. Predatory.

He’s arranging her.

Like Kylo had built their relationship on an arrangement.

It feels natural, almost pure, to have him moving her around, nudging against all her edges, diving in for his piece.

Good when she closes her mouth around his head once more and a few little sucks have him spurting, not much left after last night, but enough down her throat.

He flops down beside her, spent, his muscles chording. A limp hand of hers flops against his chest, needing to touch him but too blind to do it skillfully.

“Ben.”

He just looks at her, his silence betraying nothing.

“What did you do?”

He parts his lips, his tongue thoughtfully worrying the top one.

Then he shakes his head.

He doesn’t give her what she wants. She watches his chest rise and fall with his breath. And yet he does. So perfectly:

“I thought you liked the mystery.”

It’s the one thing she can’t have and her brain is on fire for days.

She finds out on accident.

The curiosity has her floating on air for days.

It feels so strangely good. Her monster is back in the night, and he used her so she felt it for days, and every twinge to her cunt is so delicious.

She’s looking for a pen and paper, an idea came to her about a line that was working in the back of the fleshy matter in her skull like an oyster with a pearl, and she’s just brushing past Ben’s office so she dips her fingers into a desk drawer amongst expensive pens and official monogrammed letterhead.

She finds a strange device there, her fingers still against the sleek surface.

There’s a button, but she knows what it’s going to do before she presses.

The vibrator springs to life in her palm with a fervor that unnerves her for a moment. Her head swims. She’s a little dizzy.

“Ben?”

A week ago she would not have felt up to this question. But it begs in the back of her mind, the secret it involves, and she’s so malleable to him after he fucked her so well that she woke up needier than usual and it hasn’t gone away.

A smile sparks across her lips. A real one. She cradles the toy in her palm as she pads over to where he gives a call of response from his closet.

“Yes?”

Her sock-feet cross their bedroom.

He’s got folded laundry in his hands: carefully arranging the pile of shirts to fit them all on one shelf. It’s incredibly dear to her, the mystery of the crisply folded shirts solved not by invisible hands cleaning the apartment, but him putting them away himself.

He swallows when he sees what’s in her hand.

“When were you thinking of using this on me?” she smiles at him.

She almost stumbles back from the wave of arousal when he self-consciously licks his lips and says:

“I, uh, already did.”

“Are you sure about this?”

Rey holds her slip up around her waist. It’s the middle of the afternoon. It feels like an odd time to be doing this.

They used to fuck in the afternoon all the time, at her place, where he’d rush from work for an hour and she’d hurry back from afternoon classes and wolf down a meal before evening classes.

They’d laugh the whole time from the minute he walked through the door, both of them saving time by using the newly working elevator.

“Yes,” she replies, but there’s a flicker where she’s unsure.

“How many times did you say I--?”

“Five,” he touches gently down her thighs, kissing her knee, “you came five times.”

Her breath leaves her body quickly.

“I didn’t.”

“I’m not making that up,” he says evenly, softly, but with not a lot of room to argue. “I knew every time. It was five.”

Rey has never in her life cum five times, at least without doing something in between like sleeping or getting out of bed to do laundry.

Not for lack of trying from Ben.

She rarely lets him keep going after two: it feels like her heart is going to burst when even that happens. She wants to cuddle with him when it’s over, sometimes pushing through past the orgasm to just have them hold each other. The threat of a third always has her thrash away, or kiss him demandingly so he was distracted.

“You were beautiful, by the end,” he says quietly, stroking her belly, “I knew the moment you needed me to hold you. And I did. You curled all your limbs around me and I thought you were awake. But I know now that when you say you can’t give me another, you’re lying.”

“I don’t think that’s possible,” she keeps her chin straight, staring at the ceiling.

“Then I’ll have mercy on you tonight and take four.”

He feeds the toy inside her cunt: which has been dripping since she found it in his desk.

The buzz inside makes her arch up like she’s possessed, a gasp snapping out of her chest already. Her eyes roll back.

“I really could?” she breathes up at him. He’s feeling the vibrations through the outside of her belly, stroking her in gentle circles as the toy stutters and nudges against her walls.

He cranks it up to a faster pace.

“Yes you could. You just had to let me,” he slips a fingers inside to jostle the toy in a way that almost makes her scream. “Does that worry you?”

“I let you,” she gasps, tears pricking her eyes, “I trusted you to take care of me.”

“Did I, Rey? Did you wake up feeling so good?”

“Yesss.”

The tears move hot and steady dow her neck. She remembers the eroticism of him barely controlling himself, struggling at keeping his hands off of her, and how it made her toes curl.

“Oh,” she lifts her hips, struggling against the frictionless pulse inside her, “ahh.”

Ben’s fingers press the toy into the front wall of her cunt, right up against her sweet spot.

There’s one right out the gate.

He grins darkly up at her as she cums.

“I call you ‘princess’ when I fuck you in your sleep and you like that so much,” his tongue draws a lazy circle around her clit as he uses the toy on her, “my little sleeping princess.”

She futilely kicks at the mattress as her over-sensitive aftermath isn’t accounted for even for a moment: the orgasm is long and without mercy as Ben does not withdraw or turn down the vibrations for a moment. This is for all the times she purred, for him to obey, that she’d had enough now. If he had just been using his mouth or fingers, this would be where she’d push him away and use her mouth to get some of her senses back.

He will not let her have sense even for a moment now.

“You liked when I wouldn’t let up,” he tells her, “when you were asleep.”

She believes him. Even if she doesn’t trust herself now; she trusts him. Trusts him to guard her sleeping form, care for her sleeping form, giving it everything she needs so she can wake up with what her mind won’t let her have.

“Three more,” he purrs, mouthing at the inside of her thigh. His large fingers move the toy faster as it buzzes, so just the pulse is overwhelmed by the sinewing thrusts.

She shakes her head with a choking sound in her throat.

Ben lifts his head. Feral. Afraid.

She wills herself to breathe.

“No,” she bows her chin to her chest. “No.”

Her hands tremble as he brings the toy to a dead stop inside her. His wet fingers come out. It feels so aching inside that he’d leave her there like this.

He misunderstands. She’s not done.

“Four more,” she corrects herself, and fists her hands bravely in the sheets, raising her shoulders proudly with her knees wide open. Accepting him, awake. “You said there were five.”

“Ben doesn’t want anyone but Rey to hold Freder.”

Rey’s surprised breath is smothered in those dark curls. The toddler wiggles in her lap, as Ben wills it, and Poe and Finn are cornering her with knowing smiles.

She hides her reaction by letting quiet amusement spark from his uninterrupted talking.

Freder stops short, however, as there is a pause in the adults conversing in the courtyard of Finn and Poe’s new building that Rey and Ben are there to visit like proper adults, at the sound of lightly rippling water.

“Koi pond,” Freder drones, with a look of pure unwavering adoration Rey has only seen described in the words of Lovecraft.

He wiggles in her arms as if answering a siren call, and she has to wrestle him to stay there. Ben puts a hand on her lower back.

The pose is taken up for most of the lunch. Poe and Finn eagerly watching Rey and Ben play house with their son, loving the game more than either of the Solos do. Rey likes holding Freder. He’s warm, and silly, and easier to be around that adults. Children always were for her. Their brutal honesty, their close proximity to their feelings.

They even conspire to leave the two of them alone with Freder as if the baby fever will catch when their backs are turned.

“Regretting not making one of our own when I offered?”

She can’t look up at him. Freder kicks his feet lightly against her lap, blithely attempting to escape. The flailing shoes against her thighs causes pain to some tender areas. Her doting husband sees her wince.

Ben extracts him with his large, soft hands, and sets him on the brick pavement to run around. He leans back in his seat to watch as Freder zips off.

“With someone as careful, and as stingy, with words as you I thought you’d appreciate my reasoning.”

Ben looks into her so deep she can’t breathe for a moment.

“You said you wanted a baby. I believe that. But a baby is a temporary thing, it’ll grow too fast and then we suddenly have a person for the rest of our lives, and that's what I want us to be ready for. Right now a baby is a thing to cure whatever is bothering you. If you had said you wanted to be a mother, well then, I’d make you a mother by the end of this afternoon.”

Dark, delirious intention drips from that promise. She feels it down to her toes. They curl up in her sneakers the same way they do against their sheets.

Ben’s smile is sardonic and knowing, eyes hungry, of the images he planted in her head, then he flickers his attention away as if feigning ignorance.

“Freder,” his brow furrows but he seems otherwise unconcerned, “get out of the koi pond.”

A baby, or a person?

She considers this with a shudder at the mist of perfume against her neck” colder than expected. He picked it out for her. She’s never worn it before.

Suggestions.

Compliments.

Promises.

Ben pauses in the doorway of her closet, her little dressing-table she never uses all aglow and her at a seat before it. She swivels her waist to look over her shoulder at him.

“I thought we’d go out tonight.”

Ben’s face breaks out into a beautiful smile. He steps quietly towards her and collects her face in his hands.

I’m not fragile, she wants to say, but the way he holds her makes her want to be. To submit.

Is that wrong? Is she lesser if she doesn’t have to spend every waking moment being as strong as possible?

Is she ruined like this; or just safe at last?

“You haven’t wanted to go anywhere in a while,” he muses, greatly pleased, with his tone warm and wondering.

This stings.

But it’s true. He takes her to dinner. He takes her to see Freder. He comes home where she’s waiting, or she leaves her old home where she’s waiting to come back here.

There’s a harsh reminder of a person you once were when you’re in the midst of a person you do not recognize. Rey shuts the lit of a velvet box -wealthy women don’t have jewelry boxes, they have individual boxes you’re not allowed to throw away, and smiles this time.

Conjuring a person like that’s tonight’s show.

Where she takes him, there’s a flutter of a white fan hit by harsh spotlights. It’s not her dancing, a much nicer club than Ben anticipated on the ride over, an athletic woman in silk and stockings dipping on platforms at the back of the booths.

He likes silk. He likes the quiet pace someone else sets when things are out of his control. There’s a hissing tap against the cymbals of the live band, just that, as a glove comes off. Keeping a slow pace that she knew, her spoiled boy, would make his hands twitch.

Rey is at his elbow, her chin on his shoulder, but he seems more aware of her than the Burlesque. He watches obediently, she brought him here, but it’s like he’s watching a foreign film like she dragged him to Cinema Village like she used to and is trying to be able to come up with something profound to say when it’s over instead of thinking about what’s happening now.

“Should I wear something like that?” she tries, low in his ear, and while there is that pleasured stir she wants from him so badly, he fumbles a response in the back of this throat. “Dress up for you?”

“Dress up for me?”

And he’s so surprised by this that they both are hit with this strange wave that she has been dressing up, if not for him, not very much like herself for months. Things don’t get replaced knowingly, with intention, but when a crummy tote bag loses a strap and she has a fatter stack of twenties in her wallet, she doesn’t need to outfit herself in whatever colorful one she gets from the grocery store. It’s easy to be on the other side of his money and dictate where it should go into neat piles. But she’s seated with him on this foundation, feeling it rupture and spill out from beneath them like an active volcano.

But it’s not just money, it’s not just him. She’s not a student anymore.

This is what she’s not doing with her time.

Ben accepts change. There is always a dark part he wants to exorcise and burn to  become a more excellent form. He adapts. When she met him, the kind of King who wouldn’t try to wake the sleeping princess, eating his children cooked into pies, and is now just trying to wake her up, make her smile, always trying to wake her up.

The feather fan dips teasingly to almost reveal the naked body behind it. There’s a hum of a horn rising throughout the dark club. It’s fashionable. Plush and inviting. Secretive. Like a speakeasy after prohibition; the illusion of doing something naughty when no one’s actually going to get fully naked here, in a club in New York City, because full nudity is illegal.

A law-abiding speakeasy.

They can get naked at home. A hindrance when there doesn’t have to be. They can have sex when she’s awake.

They can just voice their feelings instead of creating elaborate ways to make it into a game. They’re different now.

Ben accepts change. She does not. She sleeps through it.

The club was more successful than she initially thought: he’s handsy, playful, in the cab home and it feels so good to have his large face pressing under her chin, kissing her in the dark back seat.

He’s so good.

She’s got stockings on. To fit with the theme. He keeps playing with them, greedy under his hands, snapping into her skin, squirming to touch underneath the garters. Composed under her coat, not messy, she lets his lips play against her skin in a restrained but needy way that makes them almost seem disappointed when the car stops in front of their building.

She doesn’t strip meticulously, or to a beat, or in a planned routine. She has him on his back very quickly with her hands in his hair.

“Yes, Rey?” he sits up as she unbuckles his belt, “God, I love you.”

Her lips move hungrily across his jaw. There’s a strange moment of clarity about how odd she’s felt: it’s not him. It’s not Ben. He is imperfect and he is good and he is enough.

What is it inside her, lurking, drawing herself to him at his oddest that makes her feel so ill-equipped to be normal?

She draws her naked hips back and forth over his length, running over for him, and trembling. She is awake now.

She takes one fast, hot fuck from him, and then leaps out of bed, stumbles down the hall with shaky legs, and then gets her milk ready.

He watches her warily as she drinks it in the doorway of their dark bedroom.

Naked, still sweaty from sex, he leans back in their massive bed.

“What do you want me to do to you?”

A fluttery breath leaves her chest.

“I want you to make me your princess.”

He’s not there when she wakes up this time, and it’s that feeling. Hot cum inside her, and ache when she sits up, the lingering, empty silence that begs a thousand questions.

He’s always there when she wakes up.

Did he go to work? What time was it, even? Still night? Or one day later, into night?

She moves to get up, and without him them with warm water or a doting tongue she does tense forward and give a low whimper.

He was rough. Is it horror or delight that makes her shiver when her thighs tensed, she lifts one then the other out of the covers to see the bruises he left?

Delightful horror. Horrified delight.

She pads barefoot over to the sound of typing in his office.

Cum drips down her thighs as she moves. She wants it to drip into the carpet.

She wants every fucked-up thing she can have with this man.

Her husband works at his laptop, the recordings he plays to relax turned down very very low, but even then she can hear her own voice fill the room, reading his favorite book. The recording of the full text was a wedding present, though she knew it had nothing on the real thing for him, but he had ravished her in the name of that gift on numerous occasions, sometimes with it playing on a speaker above them while she shook apart with pleasure.

He glances up to see her at the door, face falling to petrified to see her have to come there to find him after waking up alone in bed.

“I’m sorry,” he leaps up and kisses her brow, “I’m sorry, I shouldn’t have left you alone, I just didn’t want to disturb you.”

“How long have I been out?”

At this, he has his hands on her cheeks.

“Did you eat anything yesterday?”

She purses her lips.

“I was too excited,” she whispers in response, remembering the forgetting, and a flush of guilt spills in her belly. He won’t think she’s responsible enough to do this again. She’s failed.

He’s certainly not happy with her when he presses his lips from her brow down to her cheeks.

“You can’t do that, Rey. Not when we’re doing things like this. I need to protect you.”

“Hmm,” it certainly sounds a little ironic, her inner muscles clenching to expel another wave of sticky cum, the flesh inside her feeling bruised. “You were rough.”

His eyes go wide.

He crushes her in his arms as if to make up for any feelings of being unsafe or alone, trying to undo damage that is not done. She allowed herself to trust him: he allowed her to trust him as well.

It’s nothing but a warm, good feeling to know that it can be forgiven, it is inside her to do that, and she doesn’t want the pleading she hears spilling from his lips.

“I’m...sorry. I’m so sorry. I shouldn’t have--”

She smiles greedily up at him, and he looks fearful for entirely different reasons, like she’s going to eat his heart.

“Please don’t be angry at me?”

He’s back to gentle, surprised, bowing his head close to examine her every expression.

“I can’t be. You didn’t do anything wrong.”

She shook her head.

“I just…” she bowed her head to his shoulder. The apartment was so silent it felt loud. This place was always so silent that it felt loud.

“Ben,” she says, “I don’t feel in control.”

His body starts underneath her, a pathetic whine in the back of his throat. That she can pull sounds like that from her scary Wall Street Executive of a husband is still a terrifyingly powerful sensation.

She croons, cradling his head to her chest.

“No, you didn’t do anything wrong. You followed my instructions exactly,” she brushes his hair back from his ear to kiss it, “You were so good for me.”

“It feels so strange,” he presses his brow hard into her sternum, “having you be unattainable again. I hate it, but I also missed it. The longing feels so good, to need you back, to have you in my arms but not have you with me. It was like when you were here reading to me, and I wasn’t good enough.”

This is too masochistic, even for them.

This makes her squirm.

“You were never not good enough. Not inside.”

He cards his hands into his hair.

“I wish I were good enough. I wish you were happy. I wish you were writing, or studying, or just doing something you love to do. I feel like I trapped you here.”

“No, Ben,” she tightens her arms around him, “stop. I’m fine.”

He was working at his desk. Papers are strewn about. A myth about him that she found proven untrue in the early days of their relationship was that he didn’t have to work hard, that this was easy.

Ben worked very hard for them. She felt clumsy and wasteful again, his wife on a double date ordering a dessert and then pushing it around a pretentiously-shaped plate.

“Come to bed,” she said, and it felt strange and hollow having been there all day already. Does going to bed even matter when you’re always there? Did the home she had longed for matter when it became the only space she had allowed into her life.

Her husband follows her anyway.

She tries to soothe him to sleep. It doesn’t work. She’s really done it now. Her control of the situation slipped and now he’s worried.

She tries to curl him into her arms like her tamed lion, but he stops her. Cuddles her into his chest. Strokes up and down her spine in gentle motions.

Everything she could ever want was right at her fingertips.

But how do you touch it, how do you feel it, where do you even start?

Maybe it’s over the oddness from the night after she took him to see a striptease. Maybe it’s an apology over the Canadys. Maybe he just sense something that is both there and not there.

They sneak up to the Solo’s summer home. Leia will be there, he tells her like a warning, confidently flicking a turn signal to slide in another lane on the Merritt. He says it like it might bother her. Leia will be there, but she’ll be out of the way.

She sits yoga-style on his passenger seat and her loose hair slides over one shoulder and she chews her thumbnail and realizes that the open book in front of her has not yielded words for the last five pages.

She always liked Leia, despite some estrangement.

Poe and Finn might bring Freder up for a day.

“That’d be nice,” she replies, focusing instead on flexing her kegels around to work the lingering sense of him inside back to a state of being alive. If she can always feel how he fucked her, it’s almost like he’s always fucking her.

“Rey?”

“Yes, Ben?”

She tilts her head at him. Pretending to read is tiring. The lull of the spinning wheels, his dark chariot through traffic, is soothing enough that she feels, in some odd way, tucked into bed.

He reaches for her first, sifting her hair in his free hand, cradling her haunted skull.

“You seem troubled.”

She shrugs, turning her face back to the windshield. There’s a stuffed animal squashed on the side of the road.

“I’m just worried about who’s watching the cactus.”

There is a dark hush to a forest floor with a carpet of pine needles. One tree in particular on the long driveway halfway been road and house has such a lush blanket of them she almost asks him to pull over so she can sleep on the forest floor.

She had never been good at vocalizing what she wanted. Now it’s too ridiculous to even try.

Leia doesn’t want to talk about grandchildren. She wants to talk about Rey, which is worse, sitting her down at the kitchen table and talking about a poetry anthology that her dear friend Amilyn is compiling and that the verses Rey penned so cleverly for one of Ben’s wedding presents would fit right in.

Rey had forgotten the poem. She knew she wrote one, but when it’s brought down from the mantle in a neat little frame she just stares at it.

Ben holds it like an ultrasound, tilting in the light fondly, as proud of it as he would be an upcoming healthy baby boy.

Her throat closes up for a moment.

“That might be good for you,” he says, and it’s not his completely proud and gentle tone but the words that have her head swimming, panic rising in her chest.

Rey, like a child, needs to be brought things that are good for her.

Their wedding was here. Ben skips the champagne -you always have to try harder when you’re holding champagne- and gets them a six pack from a little fishing shack kind of place, and they walk the property in their coats and cold drinks. It was really lovely in the Fall. Gold and orange and green. It’s gray and dark now, but the walk is comforting like the drift of a ghost through a haunting.

She keeps wanting to talk about Maeve Brennan. She knows he has no interest in social journalists in New York City from the Mid-20th Century, based on how dutifully and passionlessly he looked over a paper of hers on the subject back when she was in school.

She likes reading through her old New Yorker snippets. She comes across sharp, and funny, and bright. A person that Rey would like to get a drink with, ends up talking to in her head between naps.

Maeve started bright and then burned.

Brennan, tailing the end of a promising and lustrous writing career, would cash her paychecks and stand on the street corner outside the bank and just hand the cash off to people until there was none. She slept in the bathrooms of the New Yorker offices. The more there came to be to worry about, the less was known about her.

She doesn’t know why she suddenly wants so badly to tell Ben about Maeve Brennan dying alone without a squeak of work passing a page for over a decade.

But she clenches the story between her teeth, because if she tells him, he’s going to know. If she tells him, she’ll have given it away. If she tells him, he’s going to know.

There’s reprieve in Freder, somewhat. She’s got him in her arms and snuggled like a teddy bear before anyone can pry his jacket off. The family room of the cabin looks like a cabin, but is far too big with too many architectural windows, but it’s cozy and there’s a fire going and there’s almost delight, under a shimmering surface, in holding her somewhat-adopted Godchild.

“Ben probably had the orders at the ready when we pulled in,” Poe laughs, shaking out his curls as he removes a winter hat.

“I think Rey just likes children,” Ben says smoothly, as he had been in the kitchen and gave no such orders for Rey to collect Freder for an arrangement to suit his tastes. Kylo did things like that.

But he wasn’t Kylo.

Would thinks make more sense if he was?

Freder stares deep into her eyes, those big dark eyes, and she feels slightly intimidated for a moment.

“Have you ever thought about that, Rey?” Leia calls from the kitchen table, where she’s making poor Ben do the lettering for a set of thank-you notes she needs sent out with his lovely script. “Working with children?”

“How is the job hunt?”Finn is untangling a scarf, his eyebrows raised at her.

“Oh,” she tucks her chin against Freder’s curls, “yes.”

And she hopes the flurry of arrival-activity will deafen any other thoughts on the subject.

Poe brushes past to give Leia a hug.

“Have you tried--?”

“--everything, yes,” she clenches her jaw, and Freder must feel the way her body locks up because he groans in her arms like a crushed accordion.

Ben slips Freder into his arms. He’s taking Freder. Ink on his giant hands, his sweater sleeves pushed up, his face weary but turned away from her to greet his Godchild.

Was that my fault?

She looks at the family collecting together in the kitchen, Poe snagging cookies from the cooling racks by the stove, Ben allowing Freder to play with his hair, Finn marveling at the new molding around the windows.

She didn’t think to bring a pregnant belly just for something to talk about.

Is that my fault?

The ground is cold but soft, not frozen, so she and Freder are mittened up and walking together. His little hands in hers. Her pulling him up by his little arms to hop him over the trickier roots.

Ben behind them, like a wolf through the forest, so good and so loyal and so protective.

A little flicker of her past ferocity warms her belly. The next large root, she picks Freder up and keeps him up, Ben a few paces behind, and weaves into a thicket of brush.

“Rey? The path is this way.”

She keeps silent until he steps past them a few yards. Freder is silent in her arms, somehow she knew she’d be.

Her husband’s steps slow to a concerned stop.

“Come and find us,” she calls quietly from the distance.

Her disembodied voice catches him like she knew it would.

“Is now really the time for games?”

He certainly doesn’t ask like it isn’t, his steps slow and searching: prowling.

Giddiness flutters in her chest, Freder snuggled there so warmly, and she steps silently back into the trees.

He goes the wrong way. Now’s her chance.

She gleefully races with Freder in her arms, louder than necessary, in the opposite direction so he hears his mistake. Her heavy boots snap twigs, branches whack against her body, shielding Freder from them carefully, and her breath is loud and frantically alive. 

This feels good. This feels like her old self.

Being hunted again. Him so desperate to have them all together.

“I’m going to find you two,” he calls through the trees. “Just wait until I catch you.”

She smothers a laugh in Freder’s curls. She hears his heavy footsteps begin to track them down, closing in, so she creeps carefully back the way she came. He’s still attacking from the wrong angle, he’ll just miss them as she weaves through a deeper thicket of pines.

“Uncle Ben’s not going to find us,” she whispers to Freder, comfortably settled with his head rested to her shoulder, his eyes sparkling animatedly but not as excited as she wanted him to be.

Leia was right. She loves children. She should maybe--

That unnervingly accurate child-slur makes her stop dead in her tracks.

“We want Uncle Ben to find us?”

It’s pure brutality, like being clubbed in the back of the head. Freder is genuinely curious. Does she even want to be found?

Rey’s eyes go wide and she is perfectly still, like a deer facing a hunter, Freder in her arms. Ben crashes through the trees in the distance, searching in the wrong direction.

And she begins to cry.

“Rey?”

Her eyes shoot open when the door of her much, much shittier apartment closes behind him.

Shit.

He has found her.

“Rey?”

She’s caught in the act of having an affair with her bed. She’s been here every day since they returned from Connecticut.

His coat is off, his breath coming in short bursts.

“Freder and I went to the library but...but they told us you weren’t coming in anymore.”

Her fists tighten at the edges of the pillow. She hasn’t lifted her head yet, hasn’t faced away from the radiator against the wall opposite the door. Tears come out.

Rey pictures him, with Freder, both wearing gloves and coats and scarves, like the first day she met him. Her heart bruises from devastation at the image of his shoulders sagging with disappointment, his pale face lining with concern that the very kind staffers who have been so good to her telling him gravely that she’s been skipping the days she’s supposed to read for almost a month. Her stomach twists in anticipation of having to explain why she can’t make herself go.

“I took him home and came here.”

She’s humiliated him.

Shame-faced, she shoves her head deep into the pillow as he grows closer.

He settles into bed behind her, his arms curling up around her body.

“You scared the shit out of me.”

It is not accusatory, it is an undistilled offering of how he feels in this moment, generous in a way she has not been for weeks.

A low groan losses from her chest. It hurts. Everything hurts. She fucked up and he’s suspicious and worried and if she were just normal she could live her life like she has everything, like how he’s proudly been the man who has everything ever since he obtained her.

“I thought you were dead when I came in. Just now and a few weeks ago. In the library.”

“My mistress was busy tonight,” she mirrors back, her tone empty, and he sighs against her shoulder.

“Can I say something?”

Her dry, distilled tone that she hasn’t used since ducking his advances comes out. She holds the whip, which is hypocritical, because she’s been sneaking out to sleep in her old apartment for weeks and it’s glaringly obvious this wasn’t a one-time-thing.

“People only say that to ask permission for something that you don’t want said.”

He stirs behind her, confused by her sharp tone.

“That is the conceit of the question, Rey.”

“I’m not very nice,” she blurts out.

He takes a deep breath.

“You are the kindest person I know.”

“I haven’t been very nice lately.”

“You haven’t been very happy lately,” he takes another deep breath, “permission or not, I’m saying it: Rey, I think you’re depressed.”

She shakes her head.

Sobs make her entire chest tremble. She folds into herself, curls into a ball, vanishes under the bulk of him around her.

“I’m supposed to be happy.”

“It’s okay.”

“No it’s not.”

“Yes it is,” he presses his lips hard over the tears on her cheek. Her hair is limp with sleep. “You don’t have to be anything other than what you are. Not for me. Not for yourself."

“If I have it,” she presses the heels of her hands into her crying eyes, “it doesn’t just go away.”

Admitting it is so hard. That this has happened before. To be in the bright circle of a good place, shrugging off the months of sleeping and feeling numb with a smile: “I was depressed for a while, a couple of months ago.”

Saying it to other students who groan and say “Ugh, me too.”

That pesky thing, your past-tense, casual dive into desolation. Punctuated by answers of just: “Yeah, yeah, yeah.”

Everyone in the conversation skipping through the details they all understood as a shadow of themselves, behind them, as they faced the sun.

Past tense, like the times that were good were not just an air bubble to breathe between chaos. And that to say it while you’re in it, with no distance from the monster inside herself, it’s agony.

“I know,” he kisses her skin again and again. “We’re going to live with it. I know. I wish I could fix it right now. I love you so much.”

“It’s not you,” she grinds out between clenched teeth, red-faced and whining, “I have never had anyone when I’ve felt like this before. I’ve always been alone. But it’s not you. There’s something wrong with me.”

Of course it’s as simple, and as difficult as this; she just has to use her voice. She doesn’t understand what about it gives him clarity. Her life had been a series of questions with not answers lately and she is deaf to her own voice. She thought it was maybe because he took it, bought it, tricked her into giving it away.

She had not been listening to her own voice.

“Rey,” his voice is measured, and something inside her snaps; he’s the one in control and she trusts him to be there and maybe she had to test it with her bizarre experiment to know just how safe she was with him. He was so good at passing her test. “You’ve been patient with me. This is my turn to be patient with you. You don’t have to just survive anymore. You’re safe. It’s okay.”

Ben can’t slay a dragon for her. He can kiss her and kiss her; but she’s not waking up until the sleeping pills wear off. And there’s no monster that he can ply into submission with money or attention or even love.

She’s trembling and afraid, even when she’s never had love before, because she’s always had a curse that love couldn’t break.

And that sometimes she couldn’t break herself.

“Are you mad at me?” She had laughed their way to couple’s therapy, as if rich New York City couples even had enough problems to warrant couple’s therapy, but she was always pensive and tender after the appointments, “that I didn’t tell you that this has happened with me before?”

His big hand wraps around hers in the backseat of the cab. Struggling to reach over the tote bag -her leather messenger doesn’t fit all this stuff- bulging with textbooks and readers and rough drafts in order to touch her.

He can’t slay a dragon: but he can flush away those sleeping pills and say no to the Canadys invitations to dinners and the racetrack and he can find a real doctor within a week of finding her in her secret slumber and make sure he’s with her, even to just sit in the waiting room, for every appointment since then.

Of course, when they’re in their own session every other week, and she goes by herself weekly; that would be the time when she also finds a job at a school, and a friend from her graduate program misses her and wants a writing partner, and the library really wants her to help workshop this Mother-Daughter Bookclub it was trying out.

Some things she's asked to do that she would have loved to do, would have taken on, as her student self. But she does have a husband. They have lovely friends. And she doesn't want to feel like it's all or nothing.

So she says no sometimes. 

But she keeps reading at the library every week. And she volunteers at a little school, just another glorified storyteller job where she tries to get kindergarteners to talk about lessons and feelings and why not to trust wolves in the woods. That's the rudimentary argument, anyway. A solid foundation. When they get older, then they can read the books about loving the wolves.

When she was ready to ask for help, Leia had made a call to a school she had donated to outreach programs for. There was nothing they had in the budget for full-time, but she could come in a few times a week and teach an English class and got to work with children and books.

It made her very happy in a way she isn’t yet ready to talk about. When she got to listen like she had not been listened to…

Until she met Ben.

Sometimes she cries on the train ride home, her arms bulging with children's book, but it was a different kind of crying.

A profound one instead of hopeless.

It was nothing for so long: then all at once.

“Did you think it wasn’t going to come back?”

She glances sheepishly out the window. It’s a lovely Spring day. They went on their first date around this time last year. After, of course, they had annihilating sex after they admitted their feelings for each other.

The cab passes a gated schoolyard. It’s chaotic with children out for recess, and the smallness of it, the rattle of swift joy that vanishes within seconds onto the next block, makes her heart crack open.

"I think Rey feels so much," Ben said in one recent session. "She's such a deep empath that it can short-circuit. I mean, it's been incredible watching the depths of her. But it's scary for both of us. I don't know if there's a bottom. I don't think either of us know how to protect her from it."

He bows his head, his voice is very quiet.

She doesn’t like to talk after her sessions alone, but the ones together have been very helpful.

“I think I was sure it wasn’t.”

He squeezes gently, but his eyes leave their joined hands and he too looks sadly out the cab window.

“I wish you had anyway. It’s still...it’s still you. A part of you. And I love you. I just wanted to understand, at first.”

Her mouth goes dry.

“Because we had worked so hard on understanding you, and that doesn’t seem fair?”

He nods to himself, his lips thin, but then he quickly shakes his head.

“Actually, no. I was ready when I met you; ready to change. I’d wasted more time than you ever had being...not dealing with my own problems. If you weren’t ready until then, even if we got married so quickly,” his warm eyes rest on hers as he finally looks at her, “if you weren’t ready, I could wait.”

Even if they talk about it in the tender present-tense, they both seem relieved, even if it’s painful, that they’re not waiting for her to be ready to face it anymore.

She leans over her crammed orange tote back and swings her sneakered feet and presses her lips to his.

He eagerly returns his kiss like he always does: shamelessly, like he knows he earned it.

Ben is the kind of man who would wait for her for a hundred years, waiting for her to wake up again.