Keeping this pinned incase anyone ends up on this blog but is looking for my fic blog @girlwhorunswithwolves - all my writing updates will be over that way :)
I cannot do it justice so I leave it in your capable, amazing, stupendous hands.
Anything for you bestie
Trust Me
Ryland Grace/teacher!Reader | Explicit, MDNI | ~13.3k words
Tags: praise kink, soft dom, brat taming, established relationship, reverse psychology as foreplay, wellness whiteboard, elementary school teachers AU, sequel to make me, oral sex, penetrative sex
The school installs a wellness whiteboard. He tells you to drink water. You will not be drinking water. You were going to, but he told you to, so now you won't. He has a PhD and the patience of a man who has been doing the math on you for months. You have a spice rack you alphabetized for no reason and a stray cat named Rocky.
If you haven't already, I'd advise reading Make Me first before you dive into this, linked below - but that's a recommendation not an ask, because I would never ask you to do something and expect you to listen dear reader...
[ cross posted on Ao3 ] [ Make Me/ Ao3] [Make Me/ tumblr] [ fic masterlist here ]
The whiteboard arrives on a Tuesday, which should have been everyone's first warning.
It is wheeled into the staff meeting by the district wellness coordinator, a woman named Pam who does not work at this school and will never be seen again after today, and it has a laminated header that says TEAM HEALTHY HABITS in a font that is trying very hard to look fun. There are columns. There are little magnetic stars. There is, God help you all, a QR code.
"So," Pam says, "the district's rolling this out at every site this quarter. Water intake, step count, sleep hours if you want to self report. Totally optional, totally just for fun, friendly competition, no pressure."
Gary, from the back row, says, "mm," in a tone that suggests he has heard the words no pressure before and does not believe them.
"There's a small prize at the end of the month," Pam adds. "Gift card. Nothing crazy."
Dale, by the door, goes very still in the specific way of a man doing quiet mental arithmetic.
You are sitting between Brenda and an empty chair that Ryland has not gotten to yet because he stopped to help Pam carry in a second whiteboard easel nobody asked for, because of course he did, because the man cannot walk past a woman struggling with classroom equipment without turning into a golden retriever with a graduate degree.
He sits down next to you a minute later, slightly out of breath, glasses crooked.
"That thing's heavier than it looks," he says, to you, delighted, like he's just discovered something about the nature of the universe. "Also there's a QR code. Did you see the QR code?"
"I saw the QR code, Grace."
"You scan it and it logs your water automatically. That's so smart. That's genuinely so smart."
"It's a water tracker."
"It's a good water tracker."
Across the room, Alvarez says, without looking up from her clipboard, "we will not be doing team building exercises around the whiteboard," which nobody asked her about but which she clearly felt needed saying preemptively, the way you'd childproof an outlet before the baby's even born.
Dana, from two rows up, turns around in her chair. "This is absolutely a surveillance tool," she says, to the room in general. "I want that on record. This is a system designed to normalize the monitoring of bodily autonomy in a professional setting. They start with water intake, then it's step counts, then it's sleep data, and before you know it we're living in a panopticon built by a woman named Pam with a laminator and a dream. I'm participating, but I want it known that I see the architecture."
"It's a whiteboard, Dana," says Tom, who is still in his gym shorts and has what appears to be a small twig in his hair.
"That's what they said about CCTV, Tom. Anyway, does anyone know if the art supply order came in? I need more burnt sienna."
"I found a worm today," Tom says, apropos of nothing, mostly to himself. "A kid found a worm and then eleven other kids needed to see the worm. I did four thousand steps just standing near the worm."
Gary, without looking up, says, "that tracks," and goes back to his coffee.
Pam claps her hands together in the universal gesture of a woman trying to reclaim a room. "Okay! So! Columns are labeled, stars go up daily, and remember, this is just for fun and community building, not a competition."
"It's a competition," Brenda says quietly, to you, out of the side of her mouth. "It is extremely a competition."
"Obviously," you say.
Ryland, meanwhile, has already produced a pen from somewhere, uncapped it, and is looking at the whiteboard with the expression of a man mentally drafting a spreadsheet.
"I could color code mine," he says. "Blue for water, green for steps. Do we know if sleep is cumulative or nightly average, because that changes the—"
"Grace."
"What."
"It's a laminated poster with stickers."
"It's a system, and systems can be optimized."
You stare at him. He stares back, guileless, thrilled, a man who peaked emotionally at the invention of the spreadsheet and never came down.
Later, after the meeting breaks and everyone is filing out past the whiteboard to write their names in the first column, he catches your elbow, gentle, and leans in.
"You should probably grab some water before next period," he says. "You didn't have any at lunch."
He says it easily. He says it the way he'd mention the weather. He is not thinking about it at all, you can tell, because he's already looking past you at Pam's second easel, calculating something about star placement.
You had, in fact, been about to get water. There was a bottle in your bag. You had a whole plan.
The plan is now dead. You killed it yourself, on purpose, the second the sentence left his mouth, and you feel something in your chest go tight and stupid and familiar, the same feeling you used to get watching him grade with a pen behind his ear, except now it's aimed at a plastic water bottle you have decided, out of nowhere, to hate.
"I'm fine," you say.
"Okay," he says, easy, already walking off toward his classroom, already thinking about something else entirely. "Just saying, staying hydrated's good for you."
You watch him go. You look at the water bottle in your bag.
You do not drink it.
Brenda, materializing at your shoulder with the timing of a woman who has been waiting her whole life for a moment like this, follows your eyeline to Ryland's retreating back, then to your face.
"Oh no," she says, with real feeling. "Oh, sweetie. Here we go again."
—
By Thursday the whiteboard has stars on it. Not many. Enough to establish that a war is happening.
You arrive Thursday morning already annoyed at a water bottle, which is not a sentence you ever expected to be true about your own life, and you find Ryland at the coffee machine, sleeves pushed up, humming something with no tune, a fresh column of stars next to his name like he's been personally knighted by Pam's laminate.
"Morning, Mr. Grace," you say, sweet as anything, mostly to see what it does to his face.
He turns around. He considers you for a second with the mild, delighted patience of a man who has been waiting for you to start something.
"Dr. Grace," he says. "If we're being accurate."
"Nobody's being accurate. It's eight in the morning."
"I have a PhD."
"You once spent forty minutes explaining photosynthesis using a burrito."
"I teach them cellular respiration using a burrito, and I have a doctorate, so if you're going to be difficult about my name you should at least be difficult about the correct one."
"Fine. Dr. Grace." You let it sit there a second, testing the shape of it in your mouth. It does something to his face you weren't fully prepared for, a little flush at the collar, gone as fast as it arrived, filed away for later the way he files everything. "Happy?"
"Thrilled," he says, and means it, and pours you a coffee without being asked, which is somehow the most annoying thing he's done all week, because you wanted that too, and now it's just a thing he did for you instead of a thing you got for yourself, and you can't even be mad about it out loud because he didn't tell you to do anything, he just did it, quiet and easy, the absolute menace.
You drink the coffee. You do not drink the water.
By lunchtime, Dana has cornered four separate teachers to explain that the whiteboard represents, in her words, "the gamification of compliance in a late-capitalist workplace," before asking if anyone wanted to split a muffin from the vending machine. Tom has lost a shoe somewhere near the kickball field and has decided, philosophically, to simply finish the day in one sock, and Gary has said the words "I give it two weeks" to no one in particular while refilling his coffee for the third time, which everyone agrees is either about the whiteboard or about his marriage and nobody's asking which.
You find Dale and Brenda by the supply closet, heads together, and you would not have thought anything of it except that Dale startles so hard when he sees you that he drops a sticky note, and Brenda, with the reflexes of a woman who has done this before, steps on it.
"What was that."
"Nothing," Brenda says.
"Dale."
"Nothing," Dale agrees, with the conviction of a man who has never once successfully lied to anyone in his life.
You look at the sticky note under Brenda's shoe. You look at Brenda. You look at Dale, who is now examining the ceiling tiles with great interest.
"What are you two doing."
"Collaborating," Brenda says.
"On what."
"Staff morale."
"Brenda."
"Dale and I have discovered a shared interest in data collection."
"That's not better. That's worse." You look at the sticky note again. You look at the way Dale's hand is still hovering near his pocket, like a man who was mid-update when he got caught. You look at Brenda's shoe, planted with a confidence that suggests this is not the first time she's had to hide evidence with a loafer. "Is that a bet."
"It's not a bet," Brenda says, at the exact moment Dale says, "it's a friendly wager," and they look at each other with the horror of two people who have just, independently, blown the whole operation.
"On what," you say, although you already know, you have known since the word wager left Dale's mouth, you have known since the whiteboard arrived, you have possibly known since the meeting where Ryland got excited about a QR code.
Brenda sighs, peels her shoe off the sticky note, and hands it over with the resignation of a woman surrendering evidence.
You read it. It has two columns. One says GRACE and the other says your name, and there are tally marks under both, and dates, and what appears to be an odds system Dale has clearly put real thought into, because there's a note in the margin that just says vending machine snacks, all of them, winner's choice.
"You're betting on us."
"We're betting on the whiteboard," Brenda says. "Technically."
"You wrote our names on it. With tally marks. And a prize."
"For organizational purposes."
"Brenda."
"Dale started it."
"I did not start it," Dale says, wounded, "you texted me first."
"That's not the same as starting it, Dale, that's just logistics."
You hold the sticky note. You think about handing it back. You think, briefly, about being genuinely annoyed, and then you think about the fact that Dale has apparently been tracking this with real methodology, dates and tallies and a snack based prize pool, and something about the sheer commitment of it short circuits the annoyance into something closer to affection.
"Who's winning," you ask, because you are only human.
Dale and Brenda exchange a look.
"Him," they say, at the same time, with zero hesitation, and you hand the sticky note back and walk away without dignifying that with a response, mostly because you don't currently have one.
—
The staff room at lunch on Thursday is the fullest it's been since the whiteboard arrived, which is either a coincidence or evidence that the faculty of this school have collectively decided that whatever is happening between you and Ryland Grace is better than anything on television.
You suspect the latter.
Dana is at the microwave, heating something that smells aggressively of turmeric, and explaining to Tom, who did not ask, that the whiteboard's star system is "functionally identical to a social credit score if you think about it for even one second, Tom, this is how it starts, they quantify your behavior, they rank you against your peers, they create a visual hierarchy of compliance and call it wellness, and the next thing you know you're drinking eight glasses of water a day because a laminated poster told you to and you've forgotten that you ever had free will." Tom is nodding along with the polite focus of a man who has not thought about it for even one second and is mostly just waiting for the microwave. "Anyway I brought hummus if anyone wants some."
Gary is in his chair. Gary is always in his chair. Gary has a coffee and a newspaper and the particular stillness of a man who has been teaching long enough to become furniture.
Brenda is next to you. Brenda is always next to you now, in the same way that a nature documentarian is always next to the animal they're filming. Close enough to observe. Far enough not to spook the subject.
Ryland comes in late. He has chalk dust on his elbow and something that might be glitter in his hair, which suggests his last period involved either an art crossover or a very ambitious science demonstration, and knowing him it was somehow both.
He sees you. He sits across from you, eye contact territory, and sets his lunch down and starts unwrapping it with the focused precision of a man defusing a device.
"Hi," he says.
"Hi."
He glances at your water bottle. Full. Same level as this morning. He opens his mouth.
"Don't," you say.
He closes his mouth.
"Don't say it."
"I wasn't going to say anything."
"You were going to say something about the water bottle."
"I was going to ask how your morning was."
"No you weren't."
"I was. How was your morning."
"Fine."
"Great. You should drink some water."
"Grace."
"What. I'm being supportive. The whiteboard is right there. You don't have a single star this week. I have fourteen. Fourteen stars. I color coded them."
"Nobody asked you to color code them."
"The system benefits from color coding."
"The system is a laminated poster, Grace."
"And it looks great color coded."
Dana, from the microwave, turns around. "Is this a bit," she says, to the room. "Or is this real. I genuinely can't tell anymore."
"It's real," Brenda says, not looking up from her phone.
"It's not real," you say. "It's a water bottle."
"It is not just a water bottle," Dana says, turning fully now, abandoning her turmeric. "What I am watching right now is a textbook demonstration of how systems of compliance infiltrate interpersonal dynamics. He is using wellness language to exert soft control over your hydration choices, and you are resisting because on some level you understand that acquiescence to even a benign request normalizes the surrender of bodily autonomy, and honestly? It's kind of beautiful in a deeply dysfunctional way. Like watching two magnets repel each other into a relationship. Anyway has anyone seen my phone charger, I think a fourth grader took it."
Tom, who has been following this exchange with the gentle confusion of a golden retriever watching a card trick, says, "I think it's sweet."
Everyone looks at Tom.
"What?" Tom says. "He cares about her hydration. That's nice."
"Tom," Brenda says, gently. "Sweetie. It's not about the hydration."
"It's a little about the hydration," Tom says, uncertain now.
"It is not even slightly about the hydration," Gary says, from behind his newspaper, and turns a page.
Ryland, who has been sitting through this entire exchange eating his sandwich with the serene composure of a man who either cannot hear the conversation happening about him or has chosen, strategically, to pretend he cannot, finishes chewing and says, "does anyone want my apple."
Nobody responds. He puts the apple on the table between you. He does not push it toward you. He does not mention it again. He goes back to his sandwich.
You eat the apple seven minutes later when you think nobody is watching.
Everybody is watching.
Dale, under the table, makes a small mark on something you cannot see but can certainly guess at. Brenda, next to him, leans over to check it, nods once, and returns to her phone.
"I want it on record," Dana says, standing up to retrieve her turmeric, "that I called this on day one. Surveillance tool. Willing participants in our own quantification. This is Foucault. Does anyone want the rest of this hummus, it's going to go bad over the weekend."
"You're the experiment too, Dana," Gary says. "You drank six glasses yesterday."
"I drank six glasses because I like winning, Gary. My participation is an act of subversion from within. I am accelerating the contradictions."
"Is there a difference."
"There is a massive difference and I don't have time to explain it right now because I have a parent pickup in four minutes. But yes. Massive."
"Dana, you're scaring Tom," Brenda says, not looking up.
"I'm not scared," Tom says, a little scared. "I just don't know what accelerating the contradictions means and I don't want to ask."
The bell goes. Everyone starts packing up. Ryland stands, collects his lunch trash, and pauses by your chair on his way out. He leans down. He is close enough that you can smell the chalk and the coffee and whatever detergent he uses on those ridiculous t-shirts.
"You ate the apple," he says, low, just for you.
"I was hungry."
"Mm-hm."
"It had nothing to do with you."
"Of course not."
He straightens up. He walks out. You watch him go and you hear, very distinctly, Brenda exhale through her nose in the particular way that means she is composing a eulogy for your dignity.
"Sweetie," Brenda says.
"Don't."
"You ate the apple."
"I know I ate the apple, Brenda."
"In front of everyone."
"I know it was in front of everyone."
"Dale just moved you down a point."
"I don't want to know about the points."
"You're still losing."
"I said I don't want to know."
Brenda pats your shoulder once, with great affection and absolutely no pity whatsoever, and leaves.
You sit in the empty staff room and you look at the whiteboard and you look at his column of gold stars and you look at your own column, which is sparse and embarrassing and tells the story of a woman who would rather be thirsty than be told to drink, and you think: I am being outlasted by a man who unironically color codes his hydration and I have no one to blame but myself.
The apple core is still on the table. You throw it away. You do not drink any water for the rest of the afternoon.
—
It follows you home. This is the part nobody warns you about.
You know, rationally, that the whiteboard is a laminated poster in a staff room forty minutes away and has no jurisdiction over your kitchen. Your kitchen does not have a QR code. Your kitchen does not have Pam in it. And yet.
Ryland is over Friday night, feet up on your coffee table in socks that do not match, working through a stack of grading with the same low hum he always has going, and at some point he glances up and says, easy, not even really looking at you, "you should eat something, you've had like four crackers since noon."
You had, in fact, been about to make yourself a sandwich. There was bread. There was a plan.
"I'm not hungry," you say, and immediately hate yourself, because you are extremely hungry, you have been hungry for an hour, you were one sentence away from turkey and provolone and now apparently you're just going to sit here starving out of principle like a woman staging a hunger strike against a man who brought you flowers on Tuesday for no reason.
He looks up properly now. Something in his face does a small recalibration, the kind he does when a lab result doesn't match his hypothesis.
"Okay," he says, mild, and goes back to grading, and does not mention it again, which is somehow worse than if he'd pushed, because now you're sitting across from a man not eating a sandwich you desperately want purely to win an argument he doesn't know you're having.
Twenty minutes later your stomach makes a sound loud enough that Rocky, the stray cat who has been visiting your porch since September and who you are absolutely not feeding, would probably hear it from outside.
Ryland does not look up. He does, however, get up a minute later, walk into your kitchen, and start making a sandwich. Your sandwich. He knows exactly how you like it, which is its own small horror, and he sets it on a plate in front of you without a word and goes back to his stack of papers like nothing happened.
You eat the sandwich. You do not say thank you, on principle, which you are aware makes no sense, because he didn't tell you to eat it, he just made it and put it there, quiet and infuriating, the absolute menace.
"This doesn't mean anything," you say, mouth half full.
"Sure," he says, not looking up, the corner of his mouth doing the thing.
—
It keeps happening. Not dramatically. In small, stupid ways that you'd be embarrassed to describe out loud to anyone, possibly including a therapist.
He says take your shoes off, you've been standing all day, and you stay in your shoes for forty-five minutes out of pure spite, wincing the whole time, until you can quietly kick them off once he's in the other room and pretend it was your idea.
He says come sit with me, and you find something urgent to do in the kitchen that does not exist, alphabetizing a spice rack you have never once alphabetized in your life, until he wanders in twenty minutes later, looks at the spice rack, looks at you, and says nothing, and you eventually end up on the couch anyway because you wanted to be there the entire time and the spice rack was never going to hold up as a bit.
He says let me grab that, you look tired, reaching for a grocery bag, and you physically wrestle him for a bag of oranges in your own doorway rather than admit your arms are shaking.
He starts to notice the shape of it. You can tell because he stops phrasing things as suggestions and starts phrasing them as observations instead, which is somehow worse, because there's nothing to refuse.
"You look tired," he says one night, not you should rest, not you need sleep, just a fact, laid down flat between you on the couch, and you have nothing to be contrary about because he hasn't asked you for anything, he's just noticed you, out loud, and it undoes something in your chest that a direct instruction never could.
You go to bed early that night. Your own idea. You're almost annoyed about it.
—
It takes him nine days after the sandwich to crack the code, which, for a man with a doctorate, feels like it should have been faster. But you suppose he had to collect enough data first. He's a scientist. He notices patterns.
He has, apparently, noticed a pattern.
You are in the staff room, not drinking water, performing the act of not drinking water with the quiet commitment of a woman who has turned dehydration into a personality, when he walks in, sets his bag down, looks at your full water bottle, looks at your face, and says:
"Don't drink that."
You look at him.
"I'm serious. It's been sitting there too long. It's probably warm. Room temperature water is basically a punishment."
You pick up the water bottle. You drink the entire thing in four long swallows while maintaining eye contact. It is, in fact, room temperature. It is, in fact, basically a punishment. You drink it anyway because he told you not to and your nervous system has apparently been programmed by a chaos agent with no long term planning skills.
He watches you do it. His face does not change. When you put the empty bottle down he nods once, small, like a man confirming a calculation, and goes back to unpacking his lunch.
You have just been managed. You are aware you have just been managed. The sandwich. The shoes. The spice rack. He sat on your couch and watched you refuse everything he offered and he filed every single instance and he has now, quietly, built a workaround.
"Did you just," you say.
"Mm."
"Grace."
"Mm."
"Did you just reverse psychology me into drinking water."
"I don't know what you're talking about." He unwraps his sandwich. "I was genuinely concerned about the temperature of your water. Room temperature is a breeding ground for bacteria, actually, above a certain threshold, and the staff room is consistently"
"You are lying to me with science right now."
"I would never lie to you with science. Science is sacred." He takes a bite of his sandwich. The corner of his mouth is doing the thing. "Also you should probably refill that. Since it's empty now. Or don't. Don't refill it. In fact, don't drink any more water today. It's bad for you. Definitely bad."
You get up. You walk to the water cooler. You fill the bottle. You drink half of it before you've even sat back down.
He says nothing. He eats his sandwich. He gets up, walks to the whiteboard, and puts a gold star in your column. He sits back down. He does not look at you. He is radiating the quiet, smug satisfaction of a man who has just discovered a fundamental law of physics and is choosing not to publish.
—
He gets better at it. Worse at it. Both. He gets more effective and less subtle simultaneously, which is a combination that should not be possible but which he manages with the same chaotic competence he brings to everything else.
"You definitely shouldn't stay after to help me set up the lab," he says on Wednesday, leaning against your doorframe with his arms crossed and a face carefully arranged into mild indifference. "I can handle it. Don't come."
You are in his lab thirty seconds after the final bell, moving beakers with the focused determination of a woman who has been told not to.
"Oh," he says, not looking up from the microscope he is calibrating. "You're here. Weird. I specifically said don't come."
"I'm here because I want to be here."
"Sure."
"I am here of my own free will."
"Absolutely."
"This has nothing to do with you telling me not to come."
"I believe you completely." He adjusts the focus knob. "While you're here, definitely don't organize those slides by date. It would be terrible if someone did that. Real shame."
You organize the slides by date. You organize them with the furious precision of a woman who knows exactly what is happening and cannot stop it, and he hums his tuneless hum behind you and does not say a single word about it, and the not saying is louder than anything he could have said.
By the end of the second week you have gained four stars on the whiteboard. Four. This is the most stars you have accumulated in the entire challenge and every single one of them was put there out of spite.
Dale has noticed. Dale has been updating the sticky note with the cautious optimism of a man watching a long shot start to close the gap. You catch him in the hallway on Friday, making a small mark, and he looks up at you with the expression of a man who has just discovered hope.
"You've had a strong week," he says. "The numbers are shifting."
"The numbers are not shifting, Dale, I drank water because"
You stop. Because the end of that sentence is because my boyfriend figured out how to trick me into basic self care by telling me not to do it, and that is not a sentence you are going to say out loud in a school hallway to the janitor.
"Because you're committed to wellness," Dale finishes for you, kindly, and makes another small mark on the sticky note, and walks away.
—
The problem with the reverse psychology, which becomes clear approximately one week into his experiment, is that you are not actually an idiot.
You figure it out. Of course you figure it out. Not the mechanism. You clocked the mechanism on day one. But you figure out that knowing the mechanism does not, apparently, make you immune to it. He says "don't come to the staff room, I'm eating lunch alone" and your body is in the staff room before your brain has finished processing the sentence. He says "you definitely don't need a jacket, it's warm" and you are wearing two jackets. The knowing does not fix the doing. The knowing just means you get to watch yourself fall for it in real time, which is, if anything, worse.
He texts you on a Thursday. One line. don't come try the staff room coffee, it's especially bad today.
You are in the staff room in under two minutes, drinking the worst coffee of your life, and he is sitting at the round table pretending to grade and not looking at you and the corner of his mouth is doing the thing and you want to scream.
"I hate you," you tell the coffee.
"Mm," says Ryland, not looking up.
Across the table, Gary takes a long sip of his own coffee, looks from you to Ryland and back again, and says, without any particular emphasis, "you two are the most exhausting people I have ever worked with," and goes back to his newspaper.
It is the most words Gary has said in a single sentence all semester. You and Ryland both look at him. He does not elaborate. He turns a page. The room absorbs it.
"He's right, you know," Brenda says, from somewhere behind you, because Brenda is always somewhere behind you. "You are exhausting. It's my favorite thing about you."
But the reverse psychology only works at school. It works on water bottles and granola bars and lab setup and whether or not you show up to the staff room. It does not work in your bedroom. He cannot text you don't come to bed and expect you to show up, because the bedroom is not the staff room and the stakes are not a water bottle and both of you know it.
The cheat code works on everything except the thing that matters. And you can see him starting to realize it, quietly, the way he realizes everything, by watching the data and letting the conclusion come to him sideways.
—
The first time it happens you don't even clock it as the same disease. It just feels like a normal Tuesday decision.
He comes up behind you at the sink, hands on your hips, mouth at the side of your neck, low and easy, the way he does when he wants something and thinks he's being subtle about wanting it, which he is not, he has never once in his life been subtle about anything.
"Come to bed," he says, into your hair.
You want to go to bed so badly it's almost embarrassing. You have been thinking about going to bed with this man since approximately third period. The dish in your hand is not even that dirty anymore. There is no reason to keep scrubbing it besides the fact that his mouth is on your neck and some deeply unwell part of your brain has just flagged this as an instruction.
"I'm doing the dishes," you say, to a dish that does not need you.
He goes still behind you. Not annoyed still. Recalibrating still, same as the sandwich, same as the shoes, and you feel him take a small step back, physically, like he's giving the moment room to breathe.
"Okay," he says.
He does not push. He kisses your shoulder once, easy, and goes to read on the couch, and you stand at the sink scrubbing a clean dish with the specific, hollow triumph of a woman who has just won a war nobody was fighting and lost something she actually wanted.
—
It gets worse before it gets better, which is, you are realizing, generally how it goes with you.
He starts being careful about it in a way that would almost be sweet if it weren't slowly killing you. He doesn't ask again that night. He doesn't ask the next morning either, not with words, not with hands, nothing that could be mistaken for pressure. He just exists near you, warm and easy, makes you coffee, laughs at something on his phone and reads you the headline, falls asleep with a hand loose on your stomach like it's the most natural thing in the world, like he's not thinking about it at all.
You are thinking about it constantly.
You try again on Thursday, tell yourself you'll fix it, you'll be normal, you climb into his lap on the couch with clear and obvious intentions and he kisses you back for exactly four seconds before he pulls away, gentle, and says, "hey. You okay?"
Which is somehow so much worse than if he'd just kept going. Because now you have to answer, and the honest answer is I am completely fine and also inexplicably furious about a sandwich from two weeks ago and possibly need to see someone about this, and you do not have the emotional bandwidth to explain that in a way that doesn't sound insane.
"I'm fine," you say instead, and get off his lap, and he lets you go, and you both pretend to watch the rest of the episode.
—
It is not that he stops touching you. He touches you constantly, easy and unbothered, a hand at the small of your back in the kitchen, his fingers finding yours on the couch, falling asleep tangled up in you like it's nothing. It's that he stops asking for anything past that, stops reaching for more, redirects every single time like he's got a switch in his head that flips the second your face does the thing it apparently does now.
You didn't know your face did a thing. You are learning a lot about your own face this week.
Brenda notices before you say a single word about it, because Brenda notices everything, and corners you by the copier on Friday with the particular expression of a woman who has been waiting patiently for an opening.
"You look like you're fighting a war," she says.
"I'm photocopying a worksheet."
"You're fighting a war and losing it to yourself, which is a very specific look, and I have seen it exactly once before, and it was on you, six months ago, right before you ate eight of that man's chips and pretended it was four."
"That doesn't make sense."
"It doesn't have to make sense, sweetie, it just has to be true." She takes the worksheet out of the copier for you because you have been standing there long enough that it's finished twice. "What's he done now."
"Nothing. He hasn't done anything."
"Mm."
"He's been perfect, actually. That's the problem."
Brenda looks at you for a long moment, the way you imagine she looks at a chart that isn't adding up.
"Oh, sweetie," she says, with the weary affection of a woman who has clearly seen this exact disease before, possibly in a mirror. "You're punishing yourself and calling it a personality trait."
You open your mouth to argue. Nothing comes out. This is, you are beginning to suspect, going to be a theme.
—
By the end of the month the whiteboard has become, unofficially, a shrine to Ryland Grace.
His column is a solid wall of gold stars, no gaps, color coded in a system only he understands, complete with a small hand drawn key in the corner that Pam definitely did not authorize and that nobody has the heart to erase. Dana has started referring to it as "the Grace situation" in a tone usually reserved for constitutional crises, and has twice been overheard comparing it to "what happened to public radio."
Alvarez announces the winner at the last staff meeting of the month with the enthusiasm of a woman reading a parking memo. "Congratulations to Mr. Grace," she says, not looking up from her clipboard, "for completing the challenge with what I am told is a perfect record. The district sent a gift card, which I did not expect, so. There's that."
The room claps. Ryland looks genuinely, catastrophically pleased, the way he looks when a lesson plan works exactly as designed, glasses sliding, hands doing a small excited thing on the table like he cannot quite contain it inside his own arms.
"I told you the QR code was smart," he says to you, under his breath, delighted, smug in the most harmless possible way, a golden retriever who has just been handed a ribbon.
You do not say anything. You are too busy staring at Dale, who has gone the color of old paper and is very quietly putting his head down on the table.
Brenda, next to him, is doing significantly better, mostly because Brenda apparently hedged.
"You bet on him," you say to her, "and you're smiling."
"I bet on him day one," Brenda says, serene. "Dale doubled down on you last week out of pity. Sweet, but financially reckless."
"I didn't even know there was still betting."
"There's always still betting."
Dale lifts his head just enough to make eye contact with you, wounded, betrayed by science itself. "I really thought the sandwich thing would turn it around," he says, mournful. "You were so close."
"You knew about the sandwich?"
"Everybody knew about the sandwich."
You do not have time to unpack that, because Ryland is now up front accepting his gift card from Alvarez with both hands like she's handing him a Nobel Prize, thanking her, thanking the district, thanking, incredibly, Pam, who is not present and will never know. He turns around to find you in the crowd and gives you a small private grin, the one that's just for you, pleased and a little smug and completely unaware of the size of the thing currently happening in your chest.
He earned every single one of those stars honestly. He drank the water. He took the stairs. He did not have to lie to himself about a single glass of anything, because wanting a thing and doing it were, for him, apparently the exact same action, no negotiation required, no invisible committee to consult first.
You look down at your own row on the whiteboard. Sparse. Embarrassing. A month of proof that you would rather be thirsty than obedient, even to yourself.
Somewhere in the middle of the applause, watching him beam at a fifteen dollar gift card like it's a diamond, something in you goes very quiet and very clear.
You did this to yourself. All of it. Every glass of water, every sandwich, every night you climbed off his lap because your own face gave you away. He never once made you do anything. He just existed, sincere and easy and completely undefended, and you turned every offer he made into a hill to die on.
He's still looking at you. Still smiling. Still has absolutely no idea.
You manage a smile back. It feels thin on your face. You're going to need to think about this later, somewhere that isn't a staff meeting, somewhere Brenda isn't already watching you with the expression of a woman who knows exactly what's coming.
—
It's a Tuesday, obviously. Everything happens on a Tuesday in this relationship, you're starting to suspect the universe has a system, or possibly a grudge.
The gift card is still sitting on his desk, propped up against his stapler like a trophy, fifteen whole dollars of dignity you don't currently possess. You have looked at it four times today already. This is not the behavior of a well person.
You're in the staff room getting terrible coffee, the same terrible coffee, brewed in the same mysterious way that suggests intentional sabotage, and Ryland is at the round table with a kid's scraped knee incident report and a stack of "team healthy habits" star stickers he's apparently been asked to hand out to students now too, because wellness has, at this point, colonized the entire building and shows no signs of a peace treaty.
A first grader is standing next to him. She has been crying. Not dramatically. Just the quiet, hiccuping kind, the kind that happens when a kid falls off the monkey bars and is more embarrassed than hurt.
"Okay," Ryland is saying, at her eye level, voice gone soft in a register you have never once heard him use on an adult, "so here's the thing about monkey bars. They are objectively evil. I want you to know that going in. I have fallen off monkey bars as a fully grown man with a doctorate."
The kid sniffles. "Really?"
"Twice. Same week. I don't want to talk about it." He pulls a tissue out of his pocket and holds it out. "Can you blow your nose for me?"
The kid takes the tissue. The kid blows her nose. No argument. No committee. No twenty minute detour through a spice rack. Just a small person, asked to do a small thing, doing it.
"Great job," Ryland says, warm and easy, like she's just done something genuinely impressive. "That was a really good nose blow. Excellent form. I'm giving you a star for that."
He sticks a star sticker on the back of her hand, gentle, unhurried, like there is nowhere else in the world he needs to be. "There. Scientifically verified brave person."
The kid looks at the sticker, looks at him, and beams, and wanders off to go tell somebody the news, and Ryland goes back to his scraped knee incident report like nothing happened, already halfway distracted by something else, completely unaware that he has just detonated something in your chest from across the room.
You watched the whole thing. You watched him ask. You watched her do it. You watched him praise her for doing it. The simplest possible loop. Ask, action, praise. And the kid didn't flinch, didn't argue, didn't organize a single spice rack. She just did what he asked and let someone tell her she did a good job, and it looked so easy, and you are standing in the staff room holding terrible coffee and wanting to cry about a tissue.
You have said no to him three times this week. You told him you were fine. You have spent weeks quietly starving yourself of things you wanted purely so you wouldn't have to be told to want them, and he has spent those same weeks being sweet to you anyway, unbothered, patient, handing out star stickers to devastated six year olds with the same soft voice he'd use on you if you'd just let him, and also winning fifteen dollars off you fair and square in the process.
You set your coffee down. You don't remember deciding to walk over. Your feet just do it, apparently done taking instructions from the committee.
"Hey," you say.
He looks up. Whatever's on your face makes something shift in his, fast, careful. "Hey. You okay?"
"No," you say, and it comes out smaller than you meant it to. "Can we talk. Tonight. At my place."
Something in him goes very still and very focused, the way he gets right before he solves a problem he's been quietly worrying at for days.
"Yeah," he says. "Of course."
—
You don't manage it gracefully. You had, on the drive home, a whole plan, something coherent and measured, a calm explanation of pattern recognition and self sabotage that made you sound like a woman who has her life together.
What actually comes out, the second he closes your front door, is: "I don't know why I keep saying no to things I want."
He doesn't say anything right away. He just looks at you, patient, waiting, giving you room the way he's been giving you room all week, and it's that exact patience that cracks you open.
"It's stupid," you say. "It's so stupid. You ask me to eat something and some horrible little switch in my brain flips and suddenly I'm starving myself out of spite. You ask me to come to bed and I do the dishes. I did the dishes, Ryland. I hate doing dishes."
"I know."
"You knew?"
"I've watched you avoid a sink for six months. You'd rather use paper plates for the rest of your natural life."
"That's not the point."
"I know. Keep going."
You keep going. It's messy and non-linear and mostly makes sense only to you, something about the whiteboard, something about how being told to do a thing you were already going to do makes the thing suddenly unbearable, something about how it followed you home and got into your kitchen and your bed and how much you hate that it worked on something as small as a sandwich.
"And I wanted the sandwich," you say, which is, embarrassingly, the point where your voice actually breaks. "I wanted the sandwich so much."
He crosses the room. He doesn't say anything clever. He just pulls you in, both arms, solid and warm, and you stand there in your own hallway with your face against his shoulder feeling like an idiot about a turkey and provolone sandwich from three weeks ago.
He holds you for a long time. He does not, at any point, tell you it's okay, which you are grateful for, because it is not okay, it is deeply and specifically not okay, and he knows that, and he is just standing there with you inside it.
"Okay," he says, eventually, into your hair. "Can I ask you something."
"Yeah."
"What do you need. Right now. Not what you think you should say. What do you actually need."
You open your mouth.
Nothing comes out.
You close your mouth. You open it again. You stand there in his arms doing an excellent impression of a woman buffering, and the frustration of it, the genuine frustration, hits you so hard your eyes sting, because you don't know. You have spent so long refusing things that the wanting has gone blurry, like staring at a word until it stops looking like a word, and now he's asking you to read it and you can't.
"I don't know," you say, and you hate how it sounds. Small. Honest. Terrible.
He doesn't flinch. He doesn't try to fix it. He just nods, like that was a perfectly acceptable answer, and kisses the top of your head, and says, "Okay. Stay here."
He goes to your kitchen. You hear the tap run. He comes back with a glass of water.
A glass of water.
You look at it. You look at him. He is standing in your hallway holding a glass of water with the calm, unhurried patience of a man who has been thinking about this exact moment for longer than you have, and you understand, suddenly, what he's doing, and your whole body goes still.
"Drink it," he says. Soft. An instruction, but one that sounds like a question.
"I." You stop. The no is right there, right at the top of your throat, mechanical, autonomic, the same no that killed the sandwich and the shoes and three separate evenings you wanted and didn't let yourself have. You can feel it sitting there like a reflex, and he can see it, you know he can see it, because his face does not change at all.
"Trust me," he says.
Two words. He says them the way he says okay to a scared kid, the way he says keep going when you're mid-sentence and losing your nerve, the way he said yeah, of course in the staff room this afternoon. No pressure. No angle. Just him, standing there, asking you to do the smallest possible thing, and meaning it.
You take the glass.
You drink it.
It's water. It's just water. It tastes like nothing. Your hands are shaking and it's just tap water in a glass he got from your own cupboard and you drink the whole thing in one go because if you stop you will lose your nerve, and when you lower the empty glass your eyes are wet and you don't know why.
"There you go," he says. Quiet. Warm. "That's it. You did it."
Something happens in your body.
It starts in your chest. A loosening. Like a knot you didn't know was there has just been cut, not untied, cut, and the relief of it moves through you in a wave that hits your stomach, your knees, the backs of your hands, the base of your spine. Your breath catches. Your skin goes hot. You are standing in your hallway having a full physiological response to a man telling you that you drank a glass of water correctly, and the response is not subtle, it is not ambiguous, it is your entire nervous system saying oh. Oh, that. More of that. Please.
He sees it. He sees all of it. He is watching your face the way he watches a reaction in a beaker, quiet and focused and completely still, and whatever he sees there makes his eyes go dark in a way you have not seen since the first time, since the afternoon he turned you around in this exact hallway and put his mouth at your ear.
He takes the empty glass out of your hand. He sets it on the hall table. He doesn't ask. He doesn't check. He just takes your hand and walks you down the hall, steady, unhurried, because he has apparently been solving this equation in his head for weeks and has just, quietly, arrived at the answer.
In the bedroom he sits you on the edge of the bed. He stands in front of you and tips your chin up with two fingers and looks at your face like he's reading something complicated and wonderful.
"Do you know how brave that was," he says.
"It's a glass of water, Grace."
"You told me you didn't know what you needed. Out loud. To my face. And then you drank something I handed you without arguing about it for the first time in a month." His thumb traces along your jaw. "That's not a glass of water. That's you letting someone help you. That's the bravest thing I've ever seen you do, and I watched you call my teaching lazy in front of the whole department."
You make a sound that is half a laugh and half something that is not a laugh.
"And I am so in love with you," he says, like it's the next line in the same sentence, like it belongs there, like it was never going to go anywhere else.
You go completely still.
He doesn't take it back. He doesn't soften it. He just stands there with his hand at your jaw, looking down at you, and lets it land.
"Ryland."
"Mm-hm."
"Did you just."
"Yeah."
"While I'm crying about a glass of water."
"Seemed like the right moment."
"That is the worst timing of any."
"Mm-hm."
He pulls back. Just enough to look at you. His hand is still at your jaw and his face is close and his eyes are serious underneath the everything else.
"Hey," he says. "I need you to tell me what you want to happen next. No wrong answer. We can stay right here. We can go to sleep. We can talk about the whiteboard for three hours. Whatever you want."
"I want you," you say, and it comes out so fast it surprises both of you. "I want you, Ryland. Please. I'm not saying no tonight."
Something in his face settles. Not relief exactly. More like a lock clicking open.
"Okay," he says. Soft. Sure. "Okay. Come here."
He kisses you. He is standing and you are sitting on the edge of the bed and he kisses you slow, thorough, the kind of kiss that has a thesis statement, and his hands move from your jaw to your hair to the buttons of your shirt.
You reach for his collar and he catches your wrist, gentle.
"Not yet," he says against your mouth. "Let me. You're letting me tonight, remember?"
"I don't remember agreeing to that."
"You drank the water."
"That was water, not a binding contract."
"It was a little bit of a binding contract." He undoes the first button. He leans down and presses his mouth to the skin it reveals, just below your collarbone, and says against it, "you're so good at this when you stop fighting it."
Your breath catches. He hears it. He undoes the second button.
"See?" Soft. His lips moving down. "You just have to let it happen."
Something in your stomach drops. Not unpleasant. The opposite of unpleasant. A warm, liquid loosening that spreads downward, and you are suddenly aware of every inch of skin his mouth hasn't touched yet.
Third button. His mouth at the center of your chest, warm, unhurried. "You just have to sit there and be good for me and let me take care of you."
Your breath leaves your body in a way that is not voluntary. Good for me lands somewhere south of your ribcage and stays there, pulsing, and your fingers grip the edge of the bed because your hands need to be doing something or they're going to be in his hair and you were told not yet.
"Grace."
"Mm-hm."
"If you keep talking like that I'm going to."
"Going to what."
"I don't know. Something. Combust."
"Noted. I'll keep talking then." Fourth button. He pushes the shirt open and runs both hands down your sides, slow, thumbs tracing your ribs, and looks at you with that same focused quiet, and says, "you're so beautiful. You know that, right? You know I think that."
"You've mentioned it."
"I haven't mentioned it enough. I should mention it more. I should mention it constantly. I should get a whiteboard." He pushes the shirt off your shoulders and it drops behind you on the bed. "There. That was easy. Was that easy?"
"Yes."
"See how easy that was? You didn't even argue about it."
"I'm considering arguing retroactively."
"Too late. You already let me." He kisses your shoulder. "You're doing so well."
The praise is stacking up in your body like voltage. Each one lands a little lower than the last, chest to stomach to the base of your spine, and you can feel yourself getting wet, which is absurd, which is clinically absurd, because he has done nothing except unbutton your shirt and tell you that you're good at drinking water, and your body has decided that this is apparently enough to work with.
"Lie back," he says.
You lie back. You do it without arguing. The ease of it makes your breath catch, and he notices, because he always notices.
"There," he says, soft. "See? You don't have to fight everything."
"I like fighting everything."
"I know you do." He leans down and kisses your stomach, just below your navel. "But you don't have to fight me." His fingers hook into the waistband of your skirt. "Can I take this off."
"Yes."
"Yes what."
"Yes, Dr. Grace."
His whole face goes red. From the collar up, fast, the same flush you clocked at the coffee machine except this time there is nowhere for it to hide. But his mouth is doing the thing, the millimetre thing, and his eyes are bright, and you can see him filing it, logging it, adding it to whatever private catalogue he keeps of ways you have ruined him.
"Oh," he says, quiet, almost fond. "So you can still do that. Good to know. Good to know that's still in there somewhere."
"I contain multitudes."
"You contain problems." He leans down and says it against your hip. "And I am going to deal with every single one of them." His fingers hook into the waistband properly now. "A month of fighting me on everything and now you're just saying yes and letting me have this and that is." He pulls the skirt down over your hips, slow. "Genuinely." Down your thighs. "The hottest thing." Off your ankles. "You have ever done."
"I said three words."
"You said the right three words." He drops the skirt off the side of the bed. He runs both hands up your thighs, slow, thumbs tracing the inside, and you can feel how close his hands are to where you need them, and he is taking his time, and you are going to lose your mind.
He hooks his fingers into your underwear and pulls them down, slow, and you lift your hips for him and he says, soft, "good, that's it," and the sound you make is not language. He drops them off the side of the bed.
He stands back. He looks at you. You are lying on your own bed in nothing and he is fully dressed and looking at you with the calm, focused patience of a man conducting an experiment he has been designing in his head for weeks.
"You're incredible," he says. Simple. Like a fact. "You're incredible and you fought me about a sandwich."
"Can we stop talking about the sandwich."
"We will never stop talking about the sandwich." He runs one hand along the outside of your thigh, light, considering. "Sit up."
You sit up.
"I want to try something," he says. "And I want you to tell me if it's okay."
"Okay."
"I think you want to be told what to do," he says. "I think you want me to give you clear, simple instructions, and then tell you when you've done them right." He is looking at you with his glasses sliding down his nose and his face flushed and his voice steady in a way that is clearly costing him a lot to maintain. "And I think, based on the last twenty minutes, if I told you to get on your knees and put your mouth on me and I walked you through every step of it, you'd like that. A lot."
Your mouth goes dry. Your whole body goes hot. Something between your hips clenches so hard your thighs press together, involuntary, and he sees it, of course he sees it, and you watch him clock that tiny movement and file it with the same quiet satisfaction he gets from a hypothesis confirmed. He has just, out loud, in your bedroom, described the exact shape of the thing you did not know how to ask for, and he has done it on the first try, and you are going to need a minute but you do not have a minute because he is looking at you and waiting. You nod before you've finished processing the sentence.
"Words," he says.
"Yes. Yes, Ryland, please."
"Good." He is already pulling his shirt off over his head, same chest, same soft middle, same grey in the chest hair, and his hands go to his belt and he undoes it and pushes his pants and boxers down together and steps out of them, and you watch him, all of him, and you are aware that you are staring and you do not care.
He is hard. He has been hard, probably since the hallway, probably since the water glass, and the fact that he has been this hard the entire time he was patiently undressing you and praising you and keeping his voice even does something to your brain that rearranges several priorities.
He sits on the edge of the bed next to you. He leans back on his hands. He looks at you.
"Come here," he says. Soft.
You slide off the bed. You kneel between his legs. You look up at him and he looks down at you and his face does something complicated and tender and slightly wrecked.
"Start slow," he says. "Just your hand first. Get used to me."
You wrap your hand around him. He is warm and hard and the sound he makes when you touch him, a sharp inhale through his nose, tells you that the patience has been a very expensive performance. You stroke him, slow, watching his face.
"Good," he says, and his voice has gone rough. "That's good. A little tighter. Yeah. Like that."
You tighten your grip. You stroke him again, slow, root to tip, and his hips shift on the bed, just slightly, involuntary, and the involuntary part of it makes your stomach flip.
"Now your mouth," he says. "Just the tip. Slow."
You lean in. You put your mouth on him, just the head, your lips closing around him, and the sound he makes is not the teacher voice and is not the patient voice and is not any voice you have heard him use before.
"Good," he says, immediately, like a reflex. "That's good. Just like that. Stay right there."
The good hits you low in your stomach. You feel yourself clench around nothing, feel the wetness between your thighs get worse, and you haven't even moved yet. You are on your knees with your mouth on him and the word good is doing more to you than most people's hands have ever done and you are going to have to live with that information for the rest of your life.
You take him a little deeper. Slow. Your tongue traces the underside and his hips shift on the bed, involuntary, and his hand comes to the back of your head, not pushing, just resting there, his fingers threading into your hair.
"That's perfect," he says, and his voice has gone rough. "You're perfect. A little more. Just like that."
You're perfect makes your thighs press together again. He can't see it from this angle but your body doesn't care, your body is responding to his voice like it's a direct line to your nervous system, and you take him deeper, relaxing your jaw, letting him slide further into your mouth, and the sound he makes is raw and broken and it goes through you like a hand down your spine.
"God," he breathes. "You feel. That's so good. You're so good at this."
You moan around him. You can't help it. The praise is hitting you faster than you can process it, each one landing between your legs like a pulse, and the moan vibrates through him and his hand tightens in your hair and his hips jerk up and he says, "fuck," under his breath, which is the second time you have ever heard him swear and which does the same devastating thing it did the first time.
"Sorry," he says, breathless. "Sorry, I didn't mean to. You just. Your mouth is."
You pull off just enough to say, "tell me what to do next."
His eyes go dark. His hand flexes in your hair.
"Your hand," he says. "Wrap your hand around the base. Yeah. Like that. Now both. Mouth and hand together. Slow."
You do it. You stroke him and suck him at the same time, finding a rhythm, and his head tips back before he catches himself and brings it forward again because he apparently needs to watch, and the watching is making you wetter, and the wetter you get the more desperate your mouth gets, and the more desperate your mouth gets the more he talks.
"That's it. That's so good. You're doing so well. A little tighter with your hand. Yeah. God. Yeah, just like that."
Every instruction followed by praise. Every praise landing in your body like a reward. You are dripping now, you can feel it on the insides of your thighs, and he hasn't touched you below the neck, and the cycle is feeding itself, his voice making you desperate, your desperation making you eager, your eagerness making him lose his composure, his lost composure making his praise rougher and more honest, and the rougher honesty of it making you desperate all over again.
"Deeper," he says. "If you can. You don't have to."
You take him as deep as you can. You relax your throat and let him slide in and his hand grips your hair properly now, a real grip, and the sound he makes is guttural and wrecked.
"Good girl," he says, rough, barely a voice anymore. "Good girl, that's. God. That's so good."
Good girl while he's in your mouth is a different thing entirely. Good girl while he's in your mouth and his hand is in your hair and his voice is shaking goes through you like electricity, and you make a sound around him that is not dignified and not quiet and he says it again, "good girl, you're so good," and his hips are moving now, shallow, careful, letting you set the pace but unable to stay still anymore.
"Okay," he says, ragged, "okay, slow down, slow, I need you to slow down or this is going to be over before I."
You slow down. You ease off to just the tip, your tongue tracing the underside, and you look up at him.
He is looking down at you. His glasses are fogged. His chest is heaving. His hand is in your hair and his mouth is open and he is looking at you like you are the only thing left in the world, and you hold the eye contact, deliberately, your lips still around him, your tongue still moving, and you watch his face come apart in real time.
His hand tightens in your hair. Not pulling. Holding on. Like you are the thing keeping him upright.
You have never, in your entire life, felt this powerful on your knees. You are below him and you are looking up at him and he is completely, utterly, yours, and the expression on his face is like you have just solved a problem he's been working on for years and the solution was you, here, exactly like this.
"Come up here," he says. "Please. I need you up here."
You pull off him. You wipe your mouth with the back of your hand. You climb up onto the bed and he catches you and pulls you into his lap, facing him, your knees on either side of his hips, and the position puts you chest to chest, face to face, nowhere to hide from any of it.
"Hi," he says, looking up at you.
"Hi."
"Condom. Wallet. One second."
"You still keep them in your wallet?"
"I am an optimist with a very specific belief system."
He reaches behind him, fumbles for his jeans on the floor, retrieves the wallet, retrieves the condom. He tears it open and rolls it on with one hand while the other stays on your hip, keeping you close, keeping you in his lap, and the multitasking should not be as attractive as it is.
"Okay," he says. He puts both hands on your hips. He looks up at you. "This is you. Your pace. You decide how fast, how deep, everything. I'm just going to be here. Telling you things."
"What kind of things."
"Good things."
He heard you. He has been hearing you all night, every small admission, every please, every yes, and he has been keeping all of it, and now he's handing it back to you in the shape of a question he already knows the answer to.
You reach down between you. You take him in your hand and line him up and you feel him right there, pressing against you, and you look at his face and his hands tighten on your hips and he says, very quietly, "whenever you're ready."
You sink down onto him.
Slow. You take him slow because you want to feel every inch of it and because his face is right there and you can watch every single thing it does as you take him in, and what it does is extraordinary. His mouth falls open. His eyes go half closed. His fingers dig into your hips. He makes a sound that is mostly air and partly a word that might be your name and might be God and might be both.
"Good," he manages, when you are all the way down, when he is all the way inside you and you are sitting in his lap with your foreheads almost touching. "That's. Good. I can't think when you're."
"Then don't think."
Neither of you moves. Neither of you breathes. He is looking at you from below with his mouth open and his hands gripping your hips and his glasses long gone and you can feel him everywhere. His hands are on your hips and your hands are on his shoulders and you are so close you can see the exact shade his eyes go when he's trying to hold himself together.
You move.
You lift your hips and sink back down, slow, testing the angle, and the sound he makes goes straight through you. You do it again. You find a rhythm, slow and deep, your thighs doing the work, and his hands guide your hips but they don't control them, and his face is tipped up toward yours and he is watching you with the most open, most focused, most completely undone expression you have ever seen.
"There you go," he says, low. "That's it. Just like that. You feel so good."
"Ryland."
"I'm here. I'm right here. Keep going."
You keep going. You pick up the pace, just a little, shifting your hips until you find the angle that makes your breath catch, and he sees it happen on your face before you can hide it, and his hands tighten on your hips and he says, "there, stay right there, that's the one," and you stay, and the pleasure is building in a slow deep wave that starts where he's inside you and radiates outward.
"You're so beautiful," he says, looking up at you. "You're so beautiful and you're being so good and I need you to know that. I need you to hear it."
You try to say something back. What comes out is a sound that isn't a word, just air and want, and your hips grind down against him involuntarily, and he groans and grips your hips harder.
"Good." His hips start moving underneath you, meeting your rhythm, pushing deeper on the downstroke, and the combination of your movement and his sends a shock through you that makes you grab his shoulders harder.
"Ryland, I'm."
"I know." His fingers find your clit, precise, focused, and the first touch makes you jolt in his lap. "I know you are."
You are right there. You are right at the edge and his fingers are working you in tight steady circles and his hips are pushing up into you and his mouth is at your ear and you are going to come, you are going to come in his lap in about four seconds and your whole body is tightening around him and.
"Stop," he says.
You make a sound. It is not a word. It is the sound of a woman whose entire nervous system has just been asked to do something impossible.
"Stop moving. Hold still for me."
You stop. You stop moving. You are shaking and full of him and right at the edge and you stop, and the whine that comes out of you is the most pathetic sound you have ever made in your life, a desperate, high, wordless thing that you would be mortified by if you had any dignity left, which you do not, because your dignity is somewhere on the floor with your underwear.
"Good," he says, into your ear. Soft. Devastated. "Good. That's so good. You stopped. You actually stopped."
"I hate you," you say, shaking.
"You don't."
"I really, really hate you."
"Mm-hm." He kisses the side of your neck. He is not moving. He is buried in you to the hilt and he is not moving, and you can feel yourself clenching around him in small involuntary pulses, your body trying to chase something it can't reach without friction, without movement, without any of the things he has just taken away. You squeeze around him and it's not enough. You tilt your hips, barely, and his hand presses you still. His fingers have pulled away from your clit and are resting on your thigh, light, doing nothing. "You just did the hardest thing I've asked you to do all night. Do you know that?"
"I'm aware."
"I told you to stop and you stopped. A month ago you would have kept going just to spite me."
"A month ago I would have." You swallow. Your voice is thin. "Been right to."
He laughs. He laughs soft and warm against your neck and his arms tighten around you and for a second you are just two people sitting in the middle of a bed, breathing, connected, still.
"I'm going to move you now," he says. "Is that okay?"
"Yes."
"Yes what."
"Yes, Ryland, please, for the love of God."
He lifts you off him. You make a sound at the loss of him that you will deny later. He guides you forward, gentle, both hands on your hips, and you go, you go where he puts you, on your hands and knees on the bed, and you feel him behind you, and the shift in position is so different from everything that came before that your brain has to recalibrate.
You can't see his face. You can only feel him. His hands on your hips. His thighs behind yours. And then his mouth, pressing a kiss to the top of your spine.
"You've been so good," he says, against your skin. He kisses down. One vertebra at a time. Slow. "You've been so good for me tonight."
Another kiss, lower. Between your shoulder blades.
"You drank the water." Lower. The middle of your back. "You let me undress you." Lower. The dip of your waist. "You got on your knees for me." Lower. The base of your spine. "You stopped when I told you to stop."
"Ryland."
"You don't have to work anymore." His mouth is at the small of your back and his hands are on your hips and his voice is low and steady and sure. "You did so well. You did everything I asked. Now I'm going to give you what you need, and you're just going to feel it. Okay?"
"Okay."
"Okay what."
"Okay, Ryland."
"Good girl."
He lines himself up. You feel him press against you, and then he pushes in, slow, and the angle is different from this position, deeper, fuller, and you drop your head and make a sound into the pillow that has no name.
"There," he says, behind you, his hands firm on your hips. "There you go. Just feel it."
He starts to move. Slow at first, the same patience, but it doesn't stay slow for long. He picks up the pace and the angle is hitting something deep and relentless and his hands are gripping your hips and pulling you back onto him with each thrust, and you can hear him, you can hear his breathing go ragged and his voice go rough, and you cannot see his face but you can hear everything.
"You feel incredible," he says, and his voice is wrecked. "You feel. God. I have been thinking about this for weeks."
"Harder," you say into the pillow, and then, before the old reflex can ruin it, "please. Harder, please, Ryland."
"That's so good," he says, broken. "You asked so nicely."
The praise hits you like a fist. Your arms give out and you drop to your elbows, forehead against the sheets, and a sound comes out of you that is raw and desperate and has his name somewhere inside it. You can feel yourself clenching around him, involuntary, rhythmic, your body responding to his voice the way it's been responding all night, and you are so wet you can feel it on your thighs and you are shaking and he hasn't even started moving yet.
And then he gives it to you. Harder. His hips snapping against you, and one hand slides up your spine and presses flat between your shoulder blades, holding you down, gentle, firm, and the held-down feeling combined with the praise combined with the depth of him makes you cry out into the pillow, a sound you didn't know you had in you, and his hand presses you down a little firmer in response, like he's saying I know, I've got you, stay right there, without using a single word.
His other hand slides around your hip. His fingers find your clit from behind, precise, and the sound you make is loud and shapeless and you don't care.
"Come on, sweetheart," he says, behind you, above you, his voice the only thing in the room. "You've been so brave. You've been so good. Let go for me."
"Tell me," you say, and your voice is muffled in the pillow, barely there. "Tell me I'm."
"You're good," he says, immediate, sure, like the word has stopped being a reward and started being a fact. "You're so good. Good girl. Come on. I've got you."
You come with your face in the pillow and his hand between your legs and him deep inside you, and the orgasm is different from this angle, longer, heavier, something that rolls through you from the base of your spine outward, and he works you through it, his fingers steady, his hips slowing but not stopping, his voice low and constant behind you, good, that's it, good girl, there you go, I've got you, you're so good, until you are boneless and shaking and gripping the sheets with both hands.
He slows down. He leans over you. His chest against your back. His mouth at your ear. He is still inside you, still hard, still moving, barely, slow rolls of his hips.
"One more thing," he says, soft, into your ear. "Can you do one more thing for me."
"Yes."
"Stay right here. Just like this. I'm close."
"Yes. Ryland. Yes."
He picks the pace back up. His hands are back on your hips and he is not patient anymore, he is not careful, he is a man at the end of something, and you can hear it in his breathing and feel it in his rhythm going ragged and you turn your head to the side, just enough, and you say it.
"You're so good," you say.
His whole body stutters.
"You're so good, Ryland." You say it into the pillow, muffled, but loud enough. You say it like you mean it, because you do, because it is the truest thing you have said all night. "You're so good to me."
His rhythm breaks. His breathing breaks. You can feel him shaking against you and you understand that nobody has said this to him before, not like this, not while he's inside someone, not while his whole body is open and undefended, and the sound he makes is raw and wrecked and yours.
"Good boy," you say, very softly, and you feel the exact moment it lands, the exact moment his whole body goes rigid, and he comes with his face pressed between your shoulder blades and a sound that shakes through both of you, his hips pushing deep into you one last time, his hands gripping your hips hard enough that there will be marks tomorrow.
He goes still.
He is draped over your back, breathing like he's just run something. His face is between your shoulder blades and his hands are still on your hips and you are both just breathing. After a long moment he presses a kiss to the back of your neck, slow, and eases out of you, careful, and you both collapse sideways onto the bed in a graceless tangle of limbs.
He pulls you into him. Your back against his chest. His arms around you. His mouth at the top of your spine.
He is quiet for a long time. Then:
"I can't believe you did that," he says.
"Mm-hm."
"You actually."
"I did."
"You said."
"I know what I said."
He stares at the ceiling. A slow, disbelieving grin spreads across his face, the kind that starts at the corner of his mouth and takes over the whole operation, and he starts to laugh, helpless, delighted.
"I cannot believe you," he says.
"Turnabout."
"I cannot believe you just did that to me."
"Fair play, Grace."
"Fair play." He pulls you tighter against him. "God. Fair play."
"For the record," he says, into your hair, "I have also been having a very bad month."
"You won the whiteboard."
"I won the whiteboard and lost you for a month, it was a terrible trade, the gift card is fifteen dollars, it's not even enough for lunch."
You laugh. He laughs into your hair. He pulls you closer.
"You drank the water," he says.
"I drank the water."
"Without arguing."
"Without arguing."
"I'm very proud of you."
"Shut up."
"No."
You close your eyes. You let him hold you. Outside it is dark and your hallway still has an empty glass on the table and somewhere in a staff room across town there is a whiteboard with his name all over it, and you are lying in your own bed being held by a man who handed you a glass of water and meant the whole world by it, and you are, for the first time in a month, not thirsty.
"Ryland."
"Mm."
"I love you too. For the record."
"I know," he says, into your hair, pleased and warm and not at all surprised.
I’m obsessed with your Ryland grace one shots. If you ever feel like writing it I have an idea that I think about often
Ryland finding out reader has never had an orgasm with a partner. Like maybe she just lets it slip or they play never have I ever or something idk and then he’s like flabbergasted that no one took the time or bothered to make it happen.
And then he wants to try to do it for her and he just like helps her relax, pays attention, talks her through it, and maybe like teaches her how to like let herself let go if that makes sense.
Maybe he’d even like watch her do it herself first to like take note of what she likes.
Anyway thank you for your writing. No pressure to write this I just feel like you’d do it perfectly if you wanted to. You write Ryland so perfectly. You’re talented and I’m obsessed.
❤️❤️❤️ ❤️
Spotter
Ryland Grace/Reader | Explicit, MDNI | ~14k words
Tags: friends to lovers, mutual pining, oblivious ryland grace, anorgasmia, no Astrophage au!, hurt/comfort, slow burn, confessions, second person, reader insert, talking during sex, aftercare, skittles, houseplants, the chair did not get to participate
You mention, offhand, that you’ve never had an orgasm. He’s never let a solvable problem go in his life. He proposes an experiment. Strictly platonic. Variables controlled. You say yes because he’s the only person who’s ever asked you what you want in a voice that doesn’t expect an answer.
[ Cross posted on Ao3 ] [ fic master list ]
The thing about saying it out loud, you realise, is that you can't unsay it.
You can try. You can take another sip of diner coffee and pretend the sentence is still hypothetical. You can let your eyes drift to the laminated dessert menu like there's anything on it you haven't memorised. You can wait for Ryland to do what Ryland does, which is fill a silence with whatever's nearest to hand.
He doesn't.
He's looking at you across the booth with his glasses sitting askew because he pushed them up an hour ago and forgot, and he's doing the thing he does when his brain is loading. You've watched him load before. You've never been the thing he was loading.
"You'd know," he says.
"What."
"If you had. You'd know. It's a, it's not a subtle. It's not the kind of thing where you'd be like, was that it. It's the kind of thing where you'd be like, oh, okay, that. So."
"So."
"So you haven't."
You don't answer. You don't have to. He's already answered for you, with the calm of a man who has just looked at a result and decided, on balance, that the result is the result.
He picks up his fork. He puts it down. He picks it up again.
There is pie on the table between you. He ordered it like a man being held at gunpoint and it has been sitting there for nine minutes untouched, which is fine, because you've both been doing other things with your mouths, conversationally speaking, and now neither of you is doing anything with your mouth at all.
"Okay," he says.
"Don't."
"I didn't say anything."
"You said okay."
"That's a sound. Okay is a sound. I'm allowed to make sounds."
"It's a sound you make right before you say a thing."
"Sometimes." He sets the fork down for what you decide will be the final time. "Not always."
"Name one time."
He thinks about this. He thinks about it for longer than the question deserves, which is sort of his whole deal, and you watch him work through what is presumably a mental list of every time he has ever said okay, ranked by how much it preceded a thing, and you can see the exact moment he abandons the search.
"Fine," he says. "I was about to say a thing."
"I know."
"You want me to not say the thing."
"Correct."
"Even though we've now established, scientifically, that I was going to."
"Especially then."
He nods, slowly, like a man being reasonable. He is not about to be reasonable. You have known him long enough to recognise the specific quality of his nodding, and this nod is the nod of a man buying himself approximately four more seconds of runway before takeoff.
"I'm going to say the thing."
"Ryland."
It comes out before you can route around it. His name, in your mouth, sober, at a diner, on a Tuesday. You feel it land. He feels it land. The waitress, two booths down, refilling somebody's decaf, almost certainly feels it land. The whole diner tilts about half a degree on its axis and then rights itself, and you are both still sitting there, and the pie is still uneaten, and he is looking at you the way he looked at you the time you told him your dad was sick, which is to say like he is recalculating the entire evening from scratch.
"Right," he says, quieter. "Okay."
You wait.
He doesn't walk it back.
You've watched him walk things back before. You've watched him walk things back from cliffs of his own engineering. You have, on multiple occasions, handed him the rope yourself, and he has taken the rope, and you have both pretended very hard that the cliff was never there. It is one of the things the two of you do. It is, you might even say, foundational.
He doesn't take the rope.
"I have a thought," he says. "About this. The thing. The thing you said. I have a thought about it and I want to tell you the thought, and I'm asking, as a, as a friend, as your friend, I'm asking you to let me get to the end of the thought before you say anything, because if you stop me in the middle I'm not going to make it back to the start, and then we're both just going to be sitting here, and the pie is going to congeal, and somebody's going to have to pay for it, and it'll probably be me, because you always do this thing where you pretend you're going to pay and then you go to the bathroom right when the check comes."
"That's not."
"It is. It's a pattern. I've logged it."
"You haven't logged it."
"Mentally. I've mentally logged it. There's a spreadsheet, in my head, and you're on it."
You almost laugh. He sees you almost laugh. Something in his shoulders comes down half an inch and you realise, with the kind of clarity that only arrives slightly too late, that he was scared.
He is still scared. He's just less scared than he was eight seconds ago, because you almost laughed, and almost-laughing is, in the long and unwritten constitution of your friendship, a kind of green light.
"Okay," you say. "Tell me the thought."
He picks up the fork. He gestures with it, briefly, in a way that is not about pie.
"Here's the thought."
"Okay."
"The thought is, and I want to be clear that I've, this isn't a, I'm not. Okay. The thought is that this is a solvable problem."
You look at him.
"Not a problem," he says, immediately. "Wrong word. Solvable's the wrong, no, solvable's right, problem's wrong. It's a, it's a thing. It's a thing that has a, there's an answer to it. There's a, somebody could, with the right. Okay. Start again."
"You're doing great."
"I'm doing terribly."
"You're doing the talking-yourself-out-of-the-thing thing. Just say the thing."
He sets the fork down. He folds his hands on the table in front of him like a man who has decided to commit to a posture, and the posture he has committed to is guy at a parent-teacher conference, which is so deeply on-brand for him that you have to look at the dessert menu again.
"I think I could help you," he says.
The dessert menu is suddenly extremely interesting.
"Not. Not like that. I mean. Not, like. With me. I don't mean. I'm not proposing that. I'm proposing the opposite of that."
"The opposite."
"The supervised opposite. The, the. Okay. You've never gotten there because you're in your head. Yes? Generally? When you've tried? Solo, I mean. When you've tried solo."
You consider lying. You consider getting up and walking into the parking lot and starting a new life under a different name. You consider, briefly, the pie.
"Yes," you say.
"Right. Okay. So the variable isn't the, the mechanics. The mechanics are fine. The mechanics, presumably, the mechanics work. The variable is the part where you're in your head."
"And it's. It's been a thing. With. Generally. With other."
"With other people. Yes. I'm aware of the. Yes."
"Right. Right, sorry, of course you're, I wasn't implying you'd. I just meant. It's the same thing, every time, basically? The in-your-head thing?"
"Basically."
"Okay. So it's not a, it's not a them problem, necessarily, it's a, it's a you-with-them problem. Which is. That's a different problem. That's a much more interesting problem."
"Glad you find it interesting."
"I find everything interesting, that's a separate issue."
He's gathering speed now, the way he does when he's stopped being scared of the sentence and started being interested in it. You can see the gear-change happen. It's the same gear-change you've watched him do at parties, in your kitchen, in the passenger seat of your car on long drives, every time something has caught the front of his brain and the rest of him has had to scramble to keep up.
"So the solution isn't a technique thing, it's an environment thing, which means somebody can help with that without, without being a, without it being a."
"Without it being a sex thing."
"Yes. Thank you. Without it being a sex thing." He exhales. "I could sit with you. Not sit with you. I could be in the. Adjacent. I could be adjacent. I could help with the part of it that's the, the relaxing part. The talking part. The, you're safe, you can stop thinking part. And you would do the, the. You. You would do the you part."
You stare at him.
"I'd be a spotter," he says.
"A spotter."
"Like at the gym."
"Like at the gym."
"Yes."
"You're proposing to spot me."
"I am proposing," he says, with the dignity of a man who has heard his own sentence and decided to stand behind it anyway, "to spot you."
There is a silence. It is not a short silence. In the silence, the waitress refills both your coffees without making eye contact with either of you, which suggests she has been refilling coffees in this diner for long enough to know when not to.
"As your friend," he adds.
"As my friend."
"Yeah."
"In a totally."
"Totally."
"Platonic."
"Platonic."
"Capacity."
"That's the, yes. That is the capacity. The platonic capacity. I would be in a platonic capacity. Capacitating, platonically."
"That's not a word."
"It is now. I've logged it."
You drink your coffee. It is no longer too hot, which means time has been passing, which means you have actually been sitting here, in this booth, having this conversation, with this man, who you have known for years, who has just offered, in apparent good faith, to platonically supervise you having an orgasm.
The thing you should say is no.
The thing you should say is Ryland, what the fuck.
The thing you should say is any of the seventeen things lining up in your throat, all of which are reasonable, several of which are funny, two of which would let you both walk away from this booth with the friendship intact and the pie still uneaten.
"Okay," you say.
He blinks.
"Okay?"
"Okay."
"Okay as in."
"Okay as in I'll think about it."
"Right. Right. Yeah. Of course. Yeah. Think about it. Take your. There's no, there's no timeline. There's no, I'm not. Take your time."
"Ryland."
"Yeah."
"Eat your pie."
He eats his pie.
It is Saturday. It is four in the afternoon. It is, by every reasonable metric, the least sexy time of day that has ever been invented, which is part of why you picked it.
You spent Wednesday thinking about it. You spent Thursday pretending you hadn't spent Wednesday thinking about it. On Friday morning you texted him saturday? and he texted back saturday eleven seconds later, which suggested he had been waiting, which you then had to spend Friday afternoon not thinking about either.
He is in your kitchen. He is in your kitchen because you let him in eight minutes ago and neither of you has yet been able to figure out how to leave the kitchen, which is the room in your apartment that has the most furniture between you and any other room, and therefore the safest.
"So," he says.
"So."
"This is your kitchen."
"It is."
"It's nice. I like the, the. There's a thing on the wall."
"It's a calendar."
"Right. Yeah. That tracks."
He has brought, for reasons he has not yet explained, a paper bag from the bodega on the corner. He sets it on the counter. He does not open it. The bag sits there, between you, doing the same job the pie did at the diner, which is being the thing both of you can look at instead of each other.
"What's in the bag," you say.
"Skittles."
You look at him.
"It's a bag of Skittles," he says.
"You brought me Skittles."
"I brought, yes, I brought Skittles. I went into the bodega and I, I needed to bring a thing, you bring a thing, when you go to a, when you go to a." He stops. "I don't know what the etiquette is. There isn't an etiquette. I made up an etiquette and the etiquette said bring a thing and I went in and I just."
"Skittles."
"Skittles." He reaches into the bag. He produces them. He looks at them like he's never seen them before, which is a face he makes a lot, around objects he himself has purchased. "For after. I think. I think they were for after."
"After-Skittles."
"Apparently."
You look at him.
"I'm aware," he says.
You take the Skittles. You put them on the counter. You leave them there because if you put them in a cupboard you have to walk past him to do it and walking past him is currently a thing that requires more planning than it should.
"Okay," he says.
You both stand in the kitchen.
"Okay," you say.
"So the. So I was thinking, on the way over, about the. About how to. Because there's a, I think there's a setup question, right, like, where do we, where does this. Where am I."
"Where are you."
"Spatially. Where am I, spatially. In the. During."
You hadn't, until this exact moment, thought about where he would be spatially. You had been thinking about it in the abstract, in the way you think about a thing by not thinking about it, and the abstract version had him as a sort of disembodied voice somewhere in the middle distance, not a six-foot man with a bag of Skittles currently standing four feet from you in your kitchen.
"Bedroom," you say. Because the bedroom is the room with the door and the door is the thing you are increasingly aware you are going to need.
"Bedroom. Right. Yeah. And then in the bedroom I'm."
"You're."
"On a chair? Is there a chair? I could be on a chair."
"There's a chair."
"Great. Chair. Chair is good. Chair is a, chair is a piece of furniture that says I am here in an observational capacity, which is, that's the. Yeah. Chair."
You lead him to the bedroom. You do not look at him while you do it. He follows you at a distance of approximately one and a half normal-person follow-distances, which is the distance a person follows you when they are trying very hard to seem like they are not following you.
The chair is the chair in the corner where you put clothes you have not yet decided whether to put away or wear again. You moved the clothes this morning. You moved them twice. The chair, freed of its clothes, looks naked in a way the chair has never looked before.
He sits on the chair. He sits on the chair like it is the witness stand. He folds his hands in his lap. He looks at you.
You look at him.
The bed is behind you. You are extremely aware of the bed being behind you. The bed is doing a thing where it is simultaneously much larger and much smaller than it has ever been. The duvet, which you washed yesterday, which is the same duvet you have had for four years, is suddenly the most aggressive piece of textile in the apartment.
"Do you want me to," he says.
"What."
"I don't know. I was going to finish the sentence."
"Finish it."
"I lost it. I had a sentence and I lost it. It was going to be helpful."
You almost laugh. You don't, because if you start laughing you are going to keep laughing, and if you keep laughing you are not going to do the thing you came here to do, except came here is wrong, this is your apartment, you live here, you have lived here for three years and now you cannot remember how any of the rooms work.
"Okay," you say. "I'm going to."
"Yeah."
"And you're going to."
"Sit. I'm going to sit. I'm sitting. I am, currently, sitting."
"Right."
You sit on the edge of the bed. The bed makes a noise it has never made before in its life. You look at the bed, betrayed. You look at him. He is looking very intently at a spot on the wall about three feet above your head, with the specific concentration of a man who has decided that this spot, of all the spots, is the safest spot.
"This isn't going to work," you say.
"No," he agrees, immediately. "No, it's not."
"I can't. I'm not even. I haven't done anything yet and I already can't."
"Yeah."
"You're on a chair."
"I'm on a chair."
"In my bedroom."
"In your bedroom."
"You brought Skittles."
"The Skittles, I will admit, in hindsight, the Skittles were."
"What were you thinking with the Skittles."
"I don't know. I don't know what I was thinking. I was thinking what does a person need, and I got as far as sugar and then I just sort of."
You start laughing. You can't help it. You laugh with your face in your hands, which is also not a thing you usually do, and you can hear him start to laugh too, and his laugh has always been one of your favourite of the things he does, and the bedroom, which forty seconds ago was the most charged room in the building, becomes, slowly, just a room again. Just a room with you in it and him in it and a bag of Skittles two rooms away on the kitchen counter.
He waits until you've stopped.
He waits a few seconds after that.
Then he says, quietly, in a voice you have not heard from him before, "Tell me what would actually help."
You stop laughing.
You look at him. He is still on the chair. His hands are still folded. His glasses are still askew. He is the same person he was four minutes ago in your kitchen and he is also, somehow, not, because the question he just asked is not a question a facilitator asks. A facilitator does not ask what would help. A facilitator already has the protocol.
He has put the protocol down.
He is asking you.
You sit with the question. You sit with it for longer than is probably comfortable for either of you, because the honest answer is I don't know and you have spent most of your adult life refusing to say I don't know out loud about this in particular.
He waits.
This, you realise, is the new thing. Not the chair. Not the bedroom. Not the bag of Skittles two rooms away. The new thing is that he is waiting. Ryland Grace, who fills silences for a living, who would rather narrate his own hands than let a quiet go unmolested, is sitting on a chair in your bedroom letting the silence sit.
"I don't know," you say.
"Okay."
"That's the. That's basically the whole problem. I don't know what would help because I don't, I haven't ever. I don't have a, a baseline. To work from."
"Right."
"So I don't know what to tell you. To do. Or not do. Because I don't know."
"Yeah."
"And that's the. That's why I said yes, at the diner, I think. Because you said environment and I thought, oh, maybe somebody else could figure out what the environment is, because I clearly can't."
You stop. You hear what you've said. You hear, specifically, the part where you outsourced the figuring-out of yourself to him, and you wait for the embarrassment to land.
"Yeah. Yeah, because I was about to ask you a whole list of things. I had a list. In my head. I was going to ask you the list. And the list was wrong, because the list assumed you had answers, and the answers are what you don't have. So."
"So?"
"So we don't do the list."
"What do we do."
He thinks about this. He thinks about it with his elbows on his knees and his hands loose between them, which is a thinking-posture you have seen him in a thousand times, in a thousand other rooms, about a thousand other problems. The familiarity of it does something to your chest you decide not to examine.
"I think," he says, slowly, "we just talk."
"Talk."
"Yeah."
"About."
"About anything. About nothing. About the. The thing you were going to do today before I showed up. About a movie. I don't know. I think the, the issue is that you're sitting there waiting for it to be a thing, and as long as it's a thing you're going to be in your head about it. So we make it not a thing. We just. We're just in a room. We've been in rooms before."
"Not like this."
"Not exactly like this."
"You're on a chair."
"I know I'm on a chair."
"You're on a chair for a reason."
"I am aware of the reason for the chair, yes."
"You can't just talk to me like the chair isn't a thing."
"Why not."
You open your mouth. You close it. Because you don't actually have a good answer to why not. The reason the chair is a thing is that you both agreed it was a thing. He's now proposing, with his elbows on his knees, that you both un-agree.
"Okay," you say.
"Yeah?"
"Talk to me, then."
He talks to you.
He talks to you about a documentary he watched last week about deep-sea anglerfish, and the absolutely unhinged reproductive arrangement they have, which involves the male biting the female and slowly fusing into her body over time until he is essentially a permanent attached sperm-producing organ, which Ryland thinks is wild, because, and this is his exact phrase, think about the first guy who tried that. He talks to you about how he keeps meaning to repot the plant on his kitchen windowsill and how the plant keeps almost dying and then rallying, which he has started to take personally, like the plant is doing it on purpose to make him feel bad. He talks to you about the undergrad his advisor has dumped on him for the semester, who has started labelling all of her sample tubes with the same brand of glitter pen in increasingly elaborate colour-coded schemes that nobody else in the lab can decode, and Ryland cannot decide whether to address it or just let it run its course and see what the system ends up being.
He talks to you the way he talks to you on long drives. He talks to you the way he talks to you in your kitchen when you're cooking and he's allegedly helping. He talks to you the way he has been talking to you for years, and you slowly become aware that you are, despite yourself, listening.
You are also, you realise, no longer sitting on the edge of the bed.
You don't remember the moment you moved. You are leaned back against the pillows now, knees up, one hand under your jaw. He is still in the chair. He has not moved. He has been very careful not to move. The not-moving is, you suspect, deliberate, but you can't tell whether he knows it's deliberate or whether he's doing it on instinct.
"And then," he is saying, "I realised the plant was on the side of the window that doesn't get morning sun, so I moved it about eighteen inches, and now the plant is, the plant is thriving, the plant is having the best week of its life, and I am taking this entirely too personally as a, as a sort of personal."
He stops.
He has noticed you're listening. He has noticed, specifically, the way you are listening. He looks at you for a second too long. He looks away.
"You should try it," he says.
You blink.
"What."
"Touching yourself."
You stare at him.
"Now," he says. "I mean now. Not. Not while I, I'll, the chair, I'll. I can. I'll be here, but I'll be. I'll talk. I'll keep talking. About the plant. I have more about the plant. I have a, a substantial amount of additional plant content. And you just. You do the thing. You don't think about me. You don't think about it. You think about, whatever, anglerfish. And I'll just be the." He gestures, vaguely, at himself. "The voice. In the room."
"The voice in the room."
"Yes."
"That's your pitch."
"That's the pitch. The revised pitch. The pitch is, I'm going to bore you into it."
Something in your chest loosens. You don't, this time, because the loosening would break the thing that has just happened in the room, which is that the temperature has come down about six degrees and your shoulders have come down with it and you are, against everything you would have predicted forty minutes ago, considering it.
"Okay," you say.
"Okay?"
"Okay."
You reach for the hem of your shirt.
He looks, very deliberately, at the spot on the wall three feet above your head.
He starts talking about the plant.
He talks about the plant.
He talks about the plant with a level of commitment that makes you understand, in a way you have not previously understood, that he has been thinking about this plant a lot. He has theories about the plant. He has theories about the theories about the plant. He is, you realise, talking about the plant the way a man talks when he is deliberately not talking about something else, and the something else is you, sitting on your bed with your hand under your t-shirt, and he is doing this for you, and the doing-this-for-you is the part you are not supposed to be noticing, because the whole point is that you are supposed to be thinking about anglerfish.
You are not thinking about anglerfish.
You are thinking about the specific care of him not looking. You are thinking about the way his voice has gone slightly quieter, which is not a voice he uses on purpose, it's a voice that happens to him when he's concentrating on a thing he doesn't want to break. You are thinking about how, in the entire time you have known him, you have never once heard him talk this long about a houseplant without circling back to a joke, and the absence of the joke is the most attentive thing he has ever done.
Your hand has stopped moving.
He notices. He doesn't look at you, but he notices. The plant content stutters, briefly, and then resumes at a slightly different angle, lower-pressure, easier, like he's giving you a wider lane.
"You okay?" he says, into the plant story. Doesn't break the flow. Just slips it in.
"Yeah."
"You sure."
"I'm. I'm in my head."
"Okay."
"It's not. It's not the room. The room is fine. The room is. The room is fine."
"Okay."
"It's me. I'm the problem."
"You're not the problem."
"I am, though."
"You're not. You're not a problem. You're a, you're a person trying a thing. That's not a problem. That's just a person trying a thing."
You close your eyes.
You close your eyes because if you keep looking at him on that chair with his glasses askew and his hands loose between his knees, speaking very quietly about how you are a person trying a thing, you are going to start crying, and crying is not what you came here to do, and crying would be, by any reasonable measure, worse than the original problem.
"Tell me something else," you say.
"About the plant?"
"No. Not the plant. Anything that isn't the plant."
He thinks for a second.
"Okay," he says. "Okay. There's this. There's a thing I've been thinking about. About, about how your body knows things before you do. Like, physiologically. There's a, there's a fraction of a second, before you consciously feel something, where your body has already, it's already done the thing. Your heart rate's up. Your pupils are dilating. You're already responding. The conscious feeling comes second. It's catching up. It's, like, narration. The body's already in the scene and the narrator's running to keep up."
You keep your eyes closed.
"And I think about that a lot," he says, "because it means the part of you that's, the part that's thinking, the part that's worrying, that's the slow part. That's the part that arrives late. The faster part already knows what it wants. It just doesn't have words for it. So sometimes, I think, the trick is to just. Let the body have a head start. Let it. Let it get ahead of the narrator."
His voice is the quietest it has been all afternoon.
"You don't have to think about it," he says. "Your body already knows. You're just. You're letting it run."
Your hand moves.
You don't decide to move your hand. Your hand decides. Your hand has, you realise with the part of you that is still narrating, been given permission, and your hand has taken the permission. It slides down past the waistband of your jeans, which you did not unbutton, which it turns out you do not need to unbutton, and the part of you that has spent your entire adult life trying to figure out what your body wants is, for the first time, briefly, quiet.
Your fingers find the place they always find. The pressure they always find. The small careful circle they have made a thousand times alone in this bed, in this room, against this ceiling, and never once with another person in the apartment, let alone in the chair.
He keeps talking.
You don't track what he's saying. You track the cadence of it. The shape. The fact of him still being there, still in the chair, still not looking, still giving you the room. He talks about something. He talks about something else. The words slide off you and what's left is the voice, low and steady, a thing in the room with you, and you let yourself listen to it the way you let yourself listen to rain.
You are getting wet.
You notice it the way you notice everything tonight, which is late. Your fingers have been making the same slow circle and somewhere in the last few minutes the friction changed. The drag of your fingertips softened. Your body has been listening to his voice in a way your brain was not keeping track of, and your body has responded, and the response is not ambiguous. The circle gets easier. Slicker. You press slightly harder to compensate and the pressure sends something up through you that you were not expecting, a small bright flare behind your navel, and your breath catches, and you hear him pause for a fraction of a second before continuing, and you understand that he heard it too.
Something is happening.
Something is happening that has not happened before, or has not happened in this shape before, or has happened in this shape before only in fragments you couldn't trust. Your body is moving toward a thing. The thing has an edge to it. You can feel the edge. You have never felt the edge from this side, or this close, or with this much awareness that the edge is what it is, and the closer you get the more you understand that the closeness is its own problem, because the moment you notice you are close, the noticing becomes a thing you are doing, and the thing you are doing is no longer the thing your body was doing, and the narrator is in the room again.
You try to push past it. You try to do what he said. You try to let the body run.
The body slows.
You can feel it happen. You can feel the precise moment your fingers become fingers that are trying. The circle gets slightly faster, slightly harder, the way it does when you are alone and impatient with yourself, except now the impatience has nothing to do with being alone. You can feel the precise moment your breath becomes a breath you are controlling. You can feel the thing you were moving toward stay exactly where it is, neither closer nor farther, and you are no longer moving toward it, you are negotiating with it, and the negotiation is the thing you have been doing your entire adult life, and you have never won the negotiation.
You stop.
Your hand stops. You leave it where it is for a second, pressed flat, willing the feeling back, and it does not come back. Your eyes are still closed. Your jaw, you discover, is clenched, which is the opposite of what was supposed to happen.
He notices the shift in your breathing. He stops talking.
The room is very quiet.
"It's gone," you say.
"Okay."
"It was. I was. I was almost. I think I was almost."
"Yeah."
"And then I noticed I was almost and it. It left."
"Yeah."
You open your eyes. You don't look at him. You look at the ceiling. The ceiling has a small crack in it shaped like the state of Florida. You have looked at this crack while trying to fall asleep more times than you can count and you have never once successfully fallen asleep faster for having noticed it.
"That's not. That wasn't nothing," you say. "I was close. I've never been that close."
"Yeah?"
"I think so. I don't. I don't have a baseline. But I think so."
"Okay."
"It's just." You stop. You try to find the word for the feeling, which is not just frustration, although it is also frustration. It is the feeling of having stood at the edge of something and watched yourself flinch back from it, and knowing the flinch was the part you have always done, and being briefly furious at the part of yourself that flinches. "It's just frustrating."
"I know."
"You don't, actually."
He huffs out a small laugh. Not at you. With you, or at himself, or at the situation.
"Fair," he says.
You slide your hand out of your jeans. You let your arm fall to the side. You stare at the Florida crack. You are aware, distantly, that you are not crying, which is a small victory, because for a second there it could have gone either way.
"Tell me what you noticed," he says. Quiet. "About what worked. Before it didn't."
You think about it.
You think about it for longer than the question deserves, because the answer is sitting right there, and you have not yet decided whether you are going to give it to him.
The answer is your voice.
The answer is that you were here.
The answer is that the thing that worked, that got you closer than you have ever been, was the specific fact of him being in the room with you, and the specific fact of him not looking, and the specific fact that he was talking, and the way the talking made you feel like you were being held without being touched. The answer is that the variable he controlled for was himself, and the variable he controlled for is the variable that worked, and you can feel, with the part of you that has been pretending very hard for years now, that telling him this would be telling him a different thing entirely.
"I don't know," you say.
He waits.
"I don't know," you say again, and you mean it slightly differently the second time, and you are fairly sure he hears the difference.
"Okay," he says.
He doesn't push.
He sits in the chair and he waits, with his hands loose between his knees again, and you stare at the Florida crack, and the room is full of a thing neither of you is saying.
You eat the Skittles.
This is not what you expected to be doing. You expected to be doing one of several things, most of which involved more clothing being removed and fewer sweets being consumed, but here you are, sitting cross-legged on your own bed with your jeans still buttoned, splitting a bag of Skittles with a man in a chair, and neither of you is talking about the thing that just happened.
He is sorting them by colour. He is doing this automatically, the way he does everything, which is without noticing he's doing it. He has a small pile of reds, a small pile of oranges, a slightly larger pile of yellows, and he is eating the greens first because, he told you once, two years ago, on a drive back from somewhere you can't remember, the greens are the worst and he likes to get them out of the way.
You remember this. You remember this the way you remember everything about him, which is involuntarily and in too much detail.
"You're staring at me," he says.
"I'm not."
"You are. You're staring at me and I'm trying to eat the greens."
"I'm looking in your direction. There's a difference."
"There isn't."
He eats a green. He eats it with an air of finality, like a man who has completed a task.
"So," he says.
"So."
"That was."
"Yeah."
"You were close, though."
"I was close."
"That's. That's something. That's data."
"It's data."
"We could. I mean, if you wanted. We could try again. Another time. Adjust the, the variables. I think the chair was maybe too far away. Not that I, I'm not suggesting I should be closer, I'm just. Spatially. The geometry of the room might have been."
"Hey."
"Yeah."
"It's okay."
He looks at you. He looks at you the way he's been looking at you all afternoon, which is carefully, but the carefulness now has something else in it, something tired, and you recognise it because you are tired in exactly the same way.
"Yeah," he says. "Okay."
He stays for another twenty minutes. He stays because leaving immediately would make it a thing, and if there is one skill the two of you have refined over the years it is the skill of making sure things are not things. You talk about a podcast he's been telling you to listen to. You talk about whether the diner has ever actually changed its menu or if the laminated dessert card is a permanent installation. He does a bit about the pie, about how the pie has been on that menu since before either of you were born and will outlive you both, and you laugh, and the laughing is real, and underneath the laughing is the thing neither of you is saying, and underneath the thing is the afternoon, and underneath the afternoon is everything else.
He leaves at six. He puts his shoes on in your hallway and he says "see you" and you say "see you" and he does the thing he always does, which is pat the doorframe on the way out, twice, like the doorframe is something he needs to acknowledge on his way through it. You have never asked him about the doorframe thing. You have noticed it every single time.
You close the door.
You stand in your hallway for a minute.
You go back to the bedroom. The chair is still in the corner, angled slightly toward the bed. The Skittles bag is empty on the duvet. You pick it up. You throw it away. You put the clothes back on the chair and the chair becomes, once again, just a chair.
You sit on the bed.
You sit on the bed and you think about the sound his voice made when it went quiet.
Three weeks go by.
Three weeks go by and nothing changes except that everything changes. You see him. You see him the way you always see him, at the places you always see him, doing the things you always do. He texts you about the plant. He sends you a link to an article about anglerfish mating habits with no caption, which is the kind of thing he has always done, and which you have always read as friendship, and which you now read as something you cannot stop reading as something.
You do not talk about the Saturday.
He does not bring it up. You do not bring it up. It sits between you like the broken spring in the diner booth, a thing you both know is there and have agreed, silently, to navigate around. Except the broken spring was always just a spring, and this is not just a spring.
You try, alone, one night. You try the circle. You try the pressure. You try closing your eyes and letting the body run and the narrator catch up. You try everything he said. You try the breathing. You try not thinking.
It is different now.
It is different because the silence in your apartment is the wrong silence. The silence in your apartment has a shape, and the shape is the absence of his voice, and you cannot not-notice the absence. You got closer with him in the room than you have ever gotten alone, and the reason was not the technique and the reason was not the breathing and the reason was not the letting-go. The reason was the specific fact of him, in the chair, not looking, talking about a plant, and his voice going quiet without him noticing it had gone quiet, and the way that quietness felt like a hand on the back of your neck that wasn't there.
You stop trying.
You lie in the dark and you stare at the Florida crack and you think about the fact that your body has apparently decided, without consulting you, that the thing it needs in order to let go is a specific man on a specific chair saying specific things in a specific voice, and your body has furthermore decided this without any regard for the fact that this man is your best friend, and that telling him this would be telling him something else entirely, and that the something else is a door you are not sure either of you can walk back through.
A few days later he calls you because he locked himself out of his apartment and needs to kill an hour while the super finds the spare key, and you sit with him on the steps outside his building sharing a bag of chips, and he is telling you about a simulation that keeps crashing and the very specific way it crashes, which involves a number going to infinity in a way that should not be possible, and you are not listening, because his knee is touching your knee, and the place where his knee is touching your knee is the loudest thing in the city.
He doesn't notice. Or he does notice and he is doing the thing you both do, which is not noticing.
The following week you go to a bar with a group. He is there. He is always there. He is across the table talking to someone else and you watch his hands and you watch his mouth and you watch the way he pushes his glasses up with his ring finger, specifically the ring finger, which is a detail you have been carrying for longer than you are willing to calculate, and a girl next to you says something and you say "sorry, what?" and she says it again and you hear it the second time but you do not remember it afterward because his laugh has just cut across the table and landed in your chest like a thing with weight.
You go home alone. You lie in your bed. You do not try. You do not try because trying means thinking about why it doesn't work and thinking about why it doesn't work means thinking about him and thinking about him means thinking about the Saturday and thinking about the Saturday means thinking about the sound his voice made when it dropped, when it went from the voice he uses to fill a room to the voice he used to fill just the space between the chair and the bed, and that voice is now a thing that lives in your body, and your body does not care that it is inconvenient.
Another week. He sits next to you at the diner. The same booth. The same broken spring. He has pie again. He eats it this time, which feels like a statement, although you could not tell you what the statement is. You watch him eat the pie and you think about the way he said you'd know weeks ago, sitting in this exact booth, with this exact fork, and how he was right, you would know, you do know, you know everything now except the one thing, and the one thing is what his hands feel like.
You are becoming an expert in the specific weight of him. The weight of his arm when it brushes yours reaching for the check. The weight of his laugh landing on you from across a room. The weight of the silence when he looks at you one beat too long and then looks away, and the looking-away is the thing, the looking-away is the tell, because he does it the same way every time, a small sharp cut of the eyes to the left, and you have been cataloguing this cut for weeks now and you know what it means. It means he was looking at you the way you look at him and he caught himself and he stopped.
You want to tell him to stop stopping.
You don't.
You go home. You lie in the dark. You don't try. You think about the voice. You think about the voice and the chair and the quiet and the way the room felt when he was in it, and the word that keeps arriving, the word you keep circling, is safe.
You felt safe.
You have had sex with people. You have been naked with people. You have been touched and held and pressed against and none of it, not once, made you feel the thing you felt sitting fully clothed on your own bed with your best friend in a chair talking about a houseplant. You felt safe. Not safe as in nothing bad will happen. Safe as in you can stop performing. Safe as in nobody in this room needs you to be anything. Safe as in his voice was a room inside the room and the room inside the room had no expectations and your body, for the first time, did not have to negotiate its way past the fact of being watched.
He wasn't watching. That was the thing. He was there and he wasn't watching and the combination of those two facts, present and not-looking, was the thing your body had apparently been waiting for your entire adult life, and your body had not thought to mention this to you until a man on a chair started talking about a plant.
You think about the fact that permission is the word. That the thing you cannot give yourself is permission. That he gave it to you without knowing he was giving it, because the permission was not a technique, it was not a word, it was the specific fact of being safe with him, fully, in a room, with nowhere to hide, and being safe was the thing that let your body stop negotiating.
You think about this for days.
And then he is in your kitchen. Because he is often in your kitchen, because your kitchen is one of the places he exists. He is eating crackers out of a box he found in your cupboard. He is telling you about a paper his advisor rejected and the specific, surgical way the rejection was phrased, and he is doing a dramatic reading of the margin notes, and he is funny, he is so funny, and you are laughing, and your body is doing the thing where it catalogues him without your permission.
His voice.
The way he leans against your counter. The way he uses his hands when he talks. The way his whole body is oriented toward you, slightly, like a compass needle that has found its direction and does not know it has found it.
You have been looking at this for years.
"You okay?" he says.
"Yeah. Fine."
"You're doing the thing."
"What thing."
"The thing where you go somewhere and don't tell me where."
You look at him. He is leaning against your counter, in your kitchen, with cracker crumbs on his t-shirt, and his glasses are slightly askew, and he is looking at you with the same expression he wore in the chair, which is the expression of a man who is paying attention to you with a kind of focus that has nothing recreational about it.
"I tried again," you say. "Alone. After the Saturday."
The crackers stop.
"Okay," he says.
"It didn't work."
"Okay."
He says it the way he said it at the diner. The way he said it on the Saturday. The way he always says it, which is like a man setting a plate down gently so it doesn't break.
You should stop here. You have given him the update. The experiment failed to replicate. That is a clean, scientific sentence and you could leave it there and he would let you leave it there and you would both go back to the thing you do, which is not saying the thing.
You are so tired of not saying the thing.
"On the Saturday I was close," you say. "I was closer than I've ever been. And then alone, after, I couldn't even. I couldn't get anywhere near it."
"Okay."
"And I've been thinking about why. About what was different."
He waits.
You look at him. He is leaning against the counter with cracker crumbs on his shirt and he is waiting for you to finish the sentence and you can see, in the very specific way he is not moving, that he already knows what you're going to say. He knows the way he knew at the diner. He has run the numbers and the numbers have told him something and he is standing very still because the numbers are telling him a thing he does not trust himself to hear without standing very still.
"It didn't work because you weren't there."
The kitchen is very quiet. The kitchen has never been this quiet. The kitchen is the room in your apartment that has always been the safest and it is no longer safe.
He puts the box of crackers down. He puts them down carefully, the way he put the Skittles down, the way he put the fork down at the diner, the way he puts things down when his hands need to be empty for what's coming next.
"Say that again," he says.
"You heard me."
"I did. I want to hear it again."
"It didn't work because you weren't there. Your voice. It was your voice the whole time. You asked me what worked and I said I didn't know and I was lying. I knew. I knew it was you."
He is very still. He is the stillest you have ever seen him, which is not a thing you thought Ryland Grace was capable of, because he is a man who moves, who fidgets, who narrates, who fills, and right now he is doing none of those things. He is just standing in your kitchen looking at you like the whole room has rearranged itself and he hasn't caught up yet.
"I need to tell you something," he says.
"Okay."
"I need to tell you something and I'm going to be bad at it."
"Okay."
"I am in love with you." He says it to the cracker box. He says it the way he said "solvable problem" at the diner, like a man who has arrived at a conclusion and is slightly surprised by it even though the data has been pointing there for years. "I have been. For a while. I don't. I don't know when it started. I think it might have always been. I think the diner might have been the first time I let myself. And then the Saturday. The Saturday was."
"The Saturday was what."
"The Saturday was the worst idea I've ever had. And I've had a lot of bad ideas. I've had, I've had professionally bad ideas. I once almost set a lab on fire because I wanted to see what happened. And the Saturday was worse than that, because I sat in your chair and I pretended I was there for, for science, for the experiment, for the variables, and I was there because I wanted to be in the room with you. That's it. That's the whole. That's what it was."
"I think I knew," you say. "I think I've been trying not to know."
He looks at you.
"For how long," he says.
"A while. A long while. I just didn't want to be right, because being right meant the chair wasn't a chair and the experiment wasn't an experiment and we weren't."
"We weren't what."
"We weren't just friends. And I wanted us to be just friends. I wanted that so badly, Ryland. Because the version of you that shows up in my kitchen with crackers and talks to me about his plant and pats my doorframe on the way out. I didn't want to lose that. I would rather have that version and not have this than not have you."
"You would rather not have this."
"I didn't say that."
"You said."
"I said I didn't want to lose you. That's different."
He looks at you. He looks at you for a long time.
"I'm scared too," he says. "I've been scared for, for a while. I've been scared since the diner. I've been scared since before the diner, probably, I've just been, I've been filing it wrong. I filed it as, as friendship. As, that's just how this is. That's just how you feel about your best friend. You show up in their kitchen and you eat their crackers and you send them articles about anglerfish at two in the morning and you pat their doorframe on the way out, and that's. That's friendship. That's."
"That's not friendship."
"No," he says. "It isn't."
The kitchen is still very quiet.
You should be happy. You are, you think, happy. He is standing in your kitchen and he has said the thing and you have said the thing and the things are the same thing and this is, by any reasonable definition, the moment. This is the part where the door opens.
But there is something behind the door, and it has been there the whole time, and you have been trying very hard not to look at it, and now the door is open and you cannot not-look anymore.
"I need to tell you something," you say, and your voice comes out wrong. It comes out small and tight and nothing like the voice you have been using for the rest of this conversation, and you can see him hear the change, and you can see the half-second where he braces.
"Okay."
You look at the floor. You look at the floor because looking at him while you say this is not something you are able to do.
"I'm scared that if we do this. If this becomes a, a thing." You stop. You start again. "Every person I've ever been with has eventually. There's a moment where they realise I can't. Where it stops being a thing we're working on and starts being a thing that's wrong with me. And they don't always say it. But I can feel it. I can feel the moment they start thinking about it differently. And I don't want. I can't."
Your throat closes.
"I can't watch you think about me like that," you say. "I would rather not have this than watch you get tired of me not being able to get there."
He looks at you.
"Hey," he says. Quiet. "Listen to me."
"I'm listening."
"If you never get there. If this is the thing that doesn't happen. If we spend the rest of, if we're together and it never. That's okay."
"It's not."
"It is. It is okay. It is genuinely, completely okay. I didn't fall in love with you because I thought you'd, because of what you can or can't. I fell in love with you because you let me sit in a chair in your bedroom and talk about a plant. Because you remember which Skittles I eat first. Because you go somewhere in your head sometimes and I can see you go and I just want to be there when you come back. That's it. That's the whole thing. The other part is. The other part would be nice. But it's not the thing."
"Ryland."
"It's not the thing."
You are standing in your kitchen, three feet apart, and he has cracker crumbs on his shirt, and his glasses are askew, and he has just told you that he is in love with you and that whether or not you ever have an orgasm is not the point, and you believe him, because he is the worst liar you have ever met, and because his hands are shaking.
"Come here," you say.
He comes.
He comes the way he does everything, which is slightly too fast and with not quite enough plan for what happens when he gets there. He crosses the three feet of kitchen and he is in front of you and his hands are at his sides and he is looking at you and neither of you has thought past this part.
"Hi," he says.
You almost laugh.
"Hi."
"I don't. I don't know what to do with my hands."
"You could put them on me."
"Right. Right, yeah. That's. Yeah."
He puts his hands on you. He puts them on your waist, carefully, like he is handling something he is not sure he is allowed to handle, and his hands are still shaking, and the shaking is the most honest thing in the room.
You kiss him.
You kiss him because if you wait for him to do it you will both be standing in this kitchen until the heat death of the universe. You kiss him and his mouth is warm and he tastes, faintly, of crackers, and there is a moment, a very small moment, where you can feel him not know what to do with the kiss, where his mouth is just receiving yours without participating, and then the moment ends and he is kissing you back and his hands are no longer shaking because his hands have found something to do, which is pull you closer, which they do with a certainty that the rest of him has not caught up to yet.
You pull back.
"Bedroom," you say.
"Bedroom. Yeah. Okay."
You take his hand. You lead him down the hallway the same way you led him down the hallway on the Saturday, except on the Saturday you did not look at him and he followed you at one and a half normal-person follow-distances, and tonight you are looking at him and he is right behind you and his hand is in your hand and neither of you is pretending about anything.
The chair is in the corner. The clothes are on the chair. He looks at the chair.
"I'm not sitting in the chair," he says.
"You're not sitting in the chair."
"Good. I just wanted to. Officially. For the record."
You sit on the edge of the bed. The bed makes the same noise it made last time. You do not look at the bed, betrayed, this time, because this time you are looking at him, standing in the doorway of your bedroom, backlit by the hallway light, with cracker crumbs still on his shirt and his glasses slightly askew, and you think, very clearly, I am going to remember exactly what he looks like right now for the rest of my life.
"Come here," you say, again.
He comes. He sits on the bed next to you. The bed makes another noise. He looks at the bed.
"Your bed is very opinionated," he says.
"It has thoughts."
"It has thoughts. Okay."
He is next to you. He is next to you on a bed he was not on the last time he was in this room, and you can feel the difference the way you can feel a room where someone has moved the furniture. Everything is almost the same and nothing is the same.
He kisses you. He kisses you this time, and it is different from the kitchen, because in the kitchen he was catching up and now he is here, and his hands are on your face, and his thumbs are on your jaw, and he is kissing you the way he talks about things he loves, which is thoroughly and with his whole attention and with small, unnecessary detours that somehow end up being the point.
His shirt comes off first because it has cracker crumbs on it and you both agree, in a wordless negotiation that takes about four seconds, that the cracker crumbs have to go. Your shirt comes off second and he looks at you and you watch him look at you and the looking is nothing like the not-looking from the Saturday. The not-looking was protection. The looking is something else.
"You're staring," you say.
"I'm looking in your direction. There's a difference."
"You said there wasn't."
"I've revised my position."
You pull him down. He goes. He is, it turns out, slightly worse at navigating the geometry of a bed than you would have expected from a man who thinks in spatial variables, and there is a brief, deeply human negotiation of elbows and knees and where things go, and you are laughing, and he is laughing, and the laughing is not the kind of laughing that deflects. It is the kind of laughing that says we are here and we are both bad at this and that is fine.
His mouth is on your neck. His mouth is on your collarbone. His mouth is on the place between your ribs where your breathing lives, and you can feel him paying attention, the same way he was paying attention from the chair, except now the attention has hands and the hands are on your skin and the difference is so large that your brain briefly whites out trying to calculate it.
"Tell me," he says, against your stomach. "Tell me what you want."
"You."
"More specific."
"Your hands. I want your hands."
He gives you his hands.
He gives you his hands and they are not shaking anymore.
He puts them on your stomach first. Just that. Just his palms flat on your stomach, warm, still, like he is introducing himself to your skin. He stays there long enough that you feel your breathing change under his hands, and you know he feels it too, because his thumbs move, just slightly, tracing the lowest edge of your ribs, and the trace is so slow and so deliberate that you understand he is paying attention to your body the way he pays attention to everything, which is completely.
His hands move down. Over your hips. Along the waistband of your jeans, his fingers tracing the edge where fabric meets skin, and the edge is the point, the boundary is the point, because he is touching everything he is allowed to touch and not one inch past it, and the restraint is doing something to you that the touching alone would not do.
"You're thinking," you say.
"I'm always thinking."
"You're thinking like you're taking notes."
"I am taking notes. Mentally. There's a spreadsheet."
"You're bringing the spreadsheet to bed."
"The spreadsheet goes everywhere. The spreadsheet is non-negotiable."
You laugh. You laugh and his hands are on your hips and the laughing does something to the muscles in your stomach that makes his hands shift, and the shift sends something through you, a small involuntary pull, and you feel his breath catch against your neck. He felt it. He felt your body respond to a thing neither of you planned, and the feeling of him feeling it is its own thing, a feedback loop you did not anticipate, his attention on your body and your body responding to the attention and his attention sharpening in response.
Your jeans come off. You don't remember which of you undoes the button. It might be both of you, simultaneously, which would be on-brand for the evening.
His hands move lower. Slowly. Giving you time to say stop. You do not say stop.
His fingers find you. He touches you the way you touch yourself, two fingers flat against your clit, the same slow circle, except his circle is slightly different from yours, slightly slower, slightly more deliberate, and the difference is everything. When you do this yourself your hand knows where it's going. His hand doesn't. His hand is learning you in real time, adjusting pressure by the half-second, reading your breathing like a dial, and the not-knowing is the thing, because when your own hand touches you the touch is predictable and your body discounts it, and when his hand touches you there is nowhere for your body to hide.
He slides his fingers lower. Through the wet. You hear him inhale, sharp, quiet, when he feels how wet you are, and the sound of him discovering that does something to you that his hands alone could not have done. He brings the slickness back up, spreads it under his fingertips, and the circle gets easier, slicker, and you feel your hips tilt toward his hand without deciding to, your body asking for something your mouth has not said yet.
"Talk to me," you say.
"About what."
"I don't care. The plant. Anglerfish. Anything."
He laughs, softly, against your hip.
"Okay," he says. "Okay. There's this thing. About, about the way nerve endings work. The ones in your skin. They fire faster when the stimulus is unfamiliar. Your own touch, your body knows what's coming, it can predict, it sort of. It discounts. But someone else's touch, it can't predict, it doesn't know the pattern yet, so everything is. Everything is louder."
His fingers adjust. You inhale. He hears the inhale.
"That's why this is different," he says, quieter now. "That's why. Your body can't get ahead of my hands the way it gets ahead of yours. So it has to just. It has to just be in it."
You are in it.
You are in it in a way you were not in it on the Saturday, because on the Saturday you were trying to let go and tonight you are not trying anything. You are lying in your bed with his hand between your legs and his voice in your ear and you are not thinking about whether this is going to work because you are not thinking. The narrator is gone. The narrator left somewhere between his mouth on your ribs and his fingers finding the place, and what is left is the body, and the body is not negotiating.
His voice drops lower. He is not talking about nerve endings anymore. He is talking to you the way he talked to you from the chair, low and steady and close, except he is not in the chair, he is pressed against your side with his mouth near your ear and the words are less important than the sound and the sound is less important than the fact that it is him and the fact that it is him is the whole thing. The whole thing. The only variable that ever mattered.
You feel safe.
You feel safe the way you felt safe on the Saturday, except more, except closer, except his skin is against your skin and his hand is between your legs and you are not performing. You are not performing for him. You are not narrating for yourself. You are not watching yourself from the outside trying to figure out if this is working. You are just here, in your body, in your bed, with a man who has seen you fail at this and did not flinch, and the not-flinching is the safety, and the safety is the permission, and the permission is the thing your body has been waiting for.
Something builds.
Something builds and it is not like the Saturday. On the Saturday the building had an edge and you moved toward the edge and the edge stayed where it was. Tonight the edge is moving toward you. You are not chasing it. It is arriving.
Your breath catches. Your breath catches and then, without deciding to, you hold it. You hold your breath and your whole body tenses, every muscle pulling tight at once, your hand gripping his arm, your thighs closing around his wrist, and it is the opposite of everything he told you. It is the opposite of letting go. It is the opposite of letting the body run. It is holding on, holding still, holding your breath and clenching every part of yourself around the feeling so it cannot leave, and it does not leave.
It does not leave.
It breaks over you like something with weight, like something that has been waiting, like something your body knew how to do the whole time and simply needed you to stop asking it to explain itself. You make a sound. You make the sound with no air in your lungs because you are still holding your breath and the sound is small and tight and broken-open and nothing like what you imagined, nothing like what you thought it would be, and his hand does not stop. His hand keeps moving, slower now, gentler, working you through it, and his forehead is pressed against your temple and he is breathing and you are not breathing and the room is the smallest it has ever been.
And then his fingers move over you again and your whole body jerks.
You have never felt this. You have never felt what comes after because you have never had an after. Everything is oversensitive, swollen, raw, his fingertips on your clit almost too much but not quite too much, and each pass sends a smaller wave through you, an aftershock, a bright sharp thing that pulls a sound out of you that is half gasp and half something else, and the something else is surprise, because you did not know there was more, you did not know it kept going, and it keeps going. He reads the aftershocks the way he has been reading everything tonight, adjusting lighter, slower, barely touching, his fingers moving through the wet of you with so little pressure it is almost nothing, and the almost-nothing is still sending you somewhere, still pulling small involuntary shivers out of your thighs, out of your stomach, out of parts of your body you did not know were connected to this.
You breathe.
You breathe and his hand goes still. Not because he decided to stop. Because he felt you come back. He felt the exact moment your body stopped shaking and your lungs opened and the air came in, and he stilled his hand at the same moment, like the two things were the same thing, like your breathing and his hands were part of the same system.
"You'd know," he says, very quietly.
You start crying.
You don't mean to. You don't expect to. It arrives the way the other thing arrived, without permission, without negotiation, your body simply doing the thing it has decided to do, and you are crying and laughing at the same time, which is a combination you did not know you were capable of, and he pulls you into him, both arms, your face in his neck, and he holds you the way he held the fork at the diner, which is like he is never going to put you down.
"Hey," he says. "Hey. You're okay."
"I know."
"You're okay."
"I know. I know I'm okay. I'm. Ryland."
"Yeah."
"That."
"Yeah."
"That was."
"Yeah." His voice is thick. His arms are tight around you. He presses his mouth to the top of your head. "Yeah. It was."
You lie there. You lie there in your bed with your face in his neck and his arms around you and neither of you says anything for a while, because there is nothing to say that the room does not already know.
After a while, you become aware of his heartbeat. It is fast. It is faster than it should be for a man who is lying still, and you realise, with the part of you that has started paying attention again, that his body has been doing its own thing this entire time, and its thing has been waiting.
You move your hand down his chest. Down his stomach. He breathes in.
"You don't have to," he says.
"I know I don't have to."
"I just mean. Tonight was. You don't have to make it about."
"Ryland."
"Yeah."
"Shut up."
He shuts up.
He is hard. He has been hard, you suspect, for a while, possibly since the kitchen, possibly since the aftershocks, possibly since a Saturday afternoon three weeks ago when he sat in a chair and listened to you breathe. You touch him through his jeans and his hips push up into your hand once, involuntarily, and the involuntary push is the most honest thing you have learned about him tonight, and you have learned a lot of honest things about him tonight.
His jeans come off. His boxers come off. You look at him the way he looked at you and you watch him let you look, and the letting is hard for him, you can tell, the same way the letting was hard for you. He is a man who fills silences and narrates his own hands and makes jokes at the exact moment a normal person would make a different face, and right now he is doing none of that. He is lying in your bed with his clothes off and his glasses off and he is just a person, quiet, watching you look at him.
"Hi," you say.
"You keep saying that."
"I keep meaning it."
He pulls you down. He pulls you into him and kisses you and the kissing has changed again, it is different from the kitchen and different from the first time on the bed, it is slower and more certain and his hands are on your back and your skin is against his skin and the amount of skin is new, the full length of him against the full length of you is a thing neither of you has had before and you both feel it arrive, the contact, the warmth, the simple animal fact of another body.
His hand finds you again. Not the same way as before. Slower. Exploring. His fingers slide through the wet of you and you are still sensitive from before, still swollen, and the touch sends a shiver through you that he feels against his chest. He keeps his hand there, not circling, not pressing, just feeling you, learning the shape of you with his fingers like he is reading something in a language he is teaching himself.
"You feel," he starts, and doesn't finish.
"What."
"You feel incredible. I just want. I want you to know that."
You kiss him because if you try to respond to that with words you are going to cry again and you have already cried once tonight and you are trying to maintain at least the appearance of a person who has it together.
His fingers move inside you. One first, then two, and the stretch is slow and careful and his thumb is still on your clit, barely touching, and the combination makes your back arch slightly, and he watches it arch, and you feel his cock twitch against your thigh.
"I want you," you say. "I want. All of you. I want."
"Yeah?"
"Yeah."
He reaches for his jeans on the floor. He finds his wallet. He finds a condom. He tears the wrapper with his teeth because his hands are shaking again and you take it from him and roll it on yourself because his hands are shaking and your hands are steady for the first time all evening, and the reversal of that, the steadiness of your hands on him, makes him close his eyes and breathe out through his nose like a man counting to ten.
You guide him. He presses into you slowly, slowly, and you feel yourself open around him, and he makes a sound when he is all the way inside you, low and involuntary and slightly startled, like he is surprised by something he knew was coming, and you make a sound too, and the sounds are not performative, they are just the sounds two bodies make when they stop being separate.
He moves slowly. He moves slowly and carefully in a way that is not about being gentle, it is about paying attention, the same attention he has been paying all evening, except now the attention is inside you and the inside is a different kind of close. You can feel him adjusting. You can feel him reading you the way he read you with his hands, by breath, by sound, by the way your body tightens or opens, and the reading is the thing, the reading has always been the thing.
"Okay?" he says.
"Yeah."
"Still okay?"
"Ryland. I will tell you if I'm not okay."
"Right. Right. Sorry. I just."
"I know."
He moves. You move with him. There is a moment, early, where the geometry doesn't quite work, and there is a brief, honest negotiation of angles, and he laughs, quietly, against your neck, and you laugh, and the laughing is the permission it has always been. The laughing is what lets the bodies figure it out without the brains getting in the way.
He finds a rhythm. You find it with him. His forehead is against yours and his breath is on your mouth and his hands are in your hair and you are looking at each other, which is a thing you did not expect, because you have spent your entire life closing your eyes during sex, and tonight your eyes are open, and his eyes are open, and the openness is its own kind of naked.
He says your name.
He says it once, quietly, against your mouth, not as a question, not as a request, just as a fact, just as confirmation that you are here and he is here and neither of you is pretending, and the sound of your name in his voice in this room in this bed is a thing you are going to carry for a very long time.
It is not, you understand, going to happen again tonight. Your body is done with that particular miracle for now. But it does not matter. It does not matter because the sex is not about the orgasm, the sex was never about the orgasm, the sex is about the thing he said in the kitchen, which is that the orgasm is not the thing. The thing is this. His forehead on yours. His weight. His breathing getting faster. His hands gripping the sheets next to your head because he is close, he is close and you can feel it in him, and you wrap your legs around him and pull him deeper and say, very quietly, "it's okay, you can let go."
He lets go.
He lets go the way you let go, which is all at once, his whole body tensing, a sound pressed into your neck that he did not plan to make, and you hold him through it the way he held you through yours, your arms around his back, your mouth on his temple, and you feel him shake, and the shaking is the mirror of your shaking, and the room is very quiet, and the room is very full.
After a while he pulls out, carefully, and deals with the condom, and comes back. He comes back immediately, like the three seconds of not touching you were three seconds he did not care for, and he lies on his back and pulls you into his side and you go, your head on his chest, your leg over his, your hand flat on his sternum where you can feel his heart still going too fast. He presses his mouth to the top of your head and leaves it there.
After a while, you say, "The plant metaphor was a stretch."
He laughs. He laughs with his whole chest, the laugh you have been cataloguing for years, the one that cuts across rooms, except now it is in your bed, against your hair, vibrating through his ribs into yours, and it is yours. It is yours.
"The plant metaphor was science," he says.
"The plant metaphor was you buying time."
"The plant metaphor was me buying time, yes."
You lift your head. You look at him. His face, without the glasses, is a face you have technically seen before but have never seen like this, this close, with this specific expression on it, which is the expression of a man who is looking at you like you are the coolest thing he has ever seen, and he has seen anglerfish.
"Hi," you say.
"Hi."
"I think the experiment worked."
"I think," he says, "the experiment had a significant confounding variable."
"What variable."
"Me. Being in love with you. That's, that's a confound. You can't. You can't control for that."
"No," you say. "You can't."
"Might need a bigger sample size, though."
"Might."
"For rigour."
"For rigour."
He is smiling. You can feel him smiling against the top of your head. It is the smile of a man who has found a problem he would like to spend a very long time not solving.
You think about what it would be like. To get there with him inside you. To feel that edge and not flinch and hold your breath and let it break while he is as close as another person can be. You think about it not as a fear, which is new. You think about it as a thing that might happen. On a Tuesday. On a Saturday. On some unremarkable afternoon when neither of you is trying.
You kiss him. You kiss him slowly, with no urgency, with the specific calm of a person who knows she has time, and he kisses you back, and his hands are in your hair, and the chair is in the corner with the clothes on it, and the kitchen has cracker crumbs on the counter, and somewhere in this apartment there is a bag that once held Skittles, and the room is full of everything you have both been carrying, and it is light. For the first time in a very long time, it is light.
Tags: comms, EVA, voice kink, praise kink, slow burn payoff, pining, he knows she knows he knows, female reader insert, it's not the visor this time
The visor's clear. The readouts are nominal. His voice drops about three minutes in and neither of them are pretending anymore. Sequel to Frequency.
The suit sealed with the same hiss it always did. Same pressure check, same automated voice confirming cabin atmosphere, same green lights cascading down the HUD in the order she’d memorised months ago. Nothing different. Everything different.
She ran through her tether sequence. Clipped, tugged, confirmed. Her fingers were steady, which annoyed her, because steady fingers meant she couldn’t blame nerves for the way her pulse was already sitting wrong in her throat.
The airlock cycled.
“Alright,” his voice said. Right there. Right in her ear, exactly where it had been last time. “You’re showing green across the board. Pressure’s nominal, O2 is nominal, thermal’s nominal. Everything’s nominal. I’m going to stop saying nominal now because I just heard myself.”
She breathed out through her nose. Carefully.
“Copy,” she said. Even. Flat. Good.
“Stepping out whenever you’re ready. No rush. Well. Some rush. The window’s about forty minutes, but that’s plenty. You could do this one in your sleep.”
She couldn’t, actually. Not this one. Not with his voice already doing that thing where it settled into the low end of its register, casual and unhurried, like he had all the time in the world and nowhere else to be. He did that when he was teaching. He did it when he was walking someone through something technical and wanted them to feel like the ground underneath them was solid.
He’d done it last time too.
She pushed off.
The Hail Mary fell away beneath her. Or above her. Orientation was a choice out here and today she chose beneath, the long pale body of the ship dropping into the dark while she rose toward the task. Panel repair on the forward sensor array. Routine. She’d run the sim twice. Her hands knew the work. Her hands were not the problem.
“Looking good,” he said. “Tether’s tracking clean. You’ve got a nice line.”
She said nothing. Moved along the hull, mag-boots clicking in the rhythm she’d settled into across a dozen EVAs. Click, release, click, release. There was a meditation to it. There had been, once. Before the last time.
“Quiet out there,” he said, after a minute. Not a question. Just an observation, lightly tossed, see if it landed.
“Focusing,” she said.
“Right. Yeah. Good. I’ll just.” A pause. She could hear him shifting, the faint creak of the chair that always gave him away. “I’ll be here.”
That was the problem.
She reached the forward array. Knelt, if kneeling was the word for locking your boots and folding at the waist in zero-G. The panel housing was exactly where the schematics said it would be. She unclipped her toolkit, set it against the magnetised strip on her thigh, and got to work.
Two minutes of silence. Her breathing settled into the suit’s rhythm, the soft cycle of air across her face. She unseated the first bolt. Then the second. Her fingers were still steady. Fine. She was fine.
“So I’ve been thinking about thermal conductivity,” he said.
She closed her eyes. Just for a second. Just long enough to absorb the fact that this was going to be a Ryland-explains-something EVA and she was going to have to survive it.
“Not about. I mean. Related to the visor issue from last time. Which is resolved, obviously. The recalibration fixed it. I ran the numbers three times, everything’s solid. But it got me thinking about the more general case. Heat dissipation across the faceplate as a function of solar angle, and how the coating interacts with.” He stopped. Started again, differently. “You know how a car windshield fogs up from the inside when it’s cold outside?”
“Yes, Grace.”
“Okay, so it’s basically like that, except instead of your breath it’s the suit’s thermal regulation overshooting on the exhaust side, and instead of a car you’re in vacuum, so the delta is.” He paused. “Are you listening or are you tolerating?”
“I’m removing a panel housing.”
“Those aren’t mutually exclusive.”
“They might be.”
He laughed. Just a short sound, barely there, but it came through the comms like a physical thing. She felt it behind her sternum, which was idiotic, which she noted clinically and filed away for later examination.
“Fair enough,” he said. “I’ll save the thrilling conclusion for debrief.”
She got the housing off. Underneath, the sensor cluster was exactly as expected. One contact point showing corrosion. Simple swap. She reached for the replacement module and slotted it in, and her hands did not shake, and his breathing was steady in her ear like it had always been there, like it was part of the suit’s life-support systems, one more thing keeping her alive that she was not supposed to notice.
“Module’s seated,” she said. “Running the diagnostic now.”
“Copy. I’m seeing it on my end. Give it a second.”
She gave it a second. Then three. The silence stretched, and in it she could hear everything. The suit’s air circulation. Her own pulse, which she was not going to think about. His breathing, which she was absolutely not going to think about.
“Diagnostic’s clean,” he said. “Nice work.”
Something about the way he said it. Nice work. Two words, nothing behind them, except she could hear the shape of the other thing he’d said last time. You handled it really well. Same cadence. Same low, even tone. Like praise was just how he talked when he wasn’t trying to be anything, and the fact that it landed like a hand on the back of her neck was her problem, not his.
“Replacing the housing now,” she said.
“Take your time. No rush. Just nice and easy.”
She didn’t want to take her time. She wanted to finish and get back inside and take the suit off and stop being in a small sealed space with his voice and nothing else. Except she also didn’t want that. Except the part of her that had been managing this for months, the part that kept careful distance and showed up to meals five minutes after he sat down and chose the chair on the opposite side of the lab, that part was losing an argument she hadn’t agreed to have.
She lined up the first bolt. Drove it home.
“Good. That’s seated. Second one should line up if you angle it about ten degrees left.”
She angled it. It caught. He was right, because he was always right about the mechanical things, the spatial things, the things he could see from the console better than she could feel with her hands.
“There you go. Just like that. Steady.”
His voice had dropped. Not dramatically. Not in a way she thought he’d noticed. But the register had shifted, the same way it had shifted last time without either of them naming it. Slower. More deliberate. The spaces between the words wider, like each one was being placed carefully instead of tumbling out in the usual pile.
Her hands stopped. Not because of the words. Because of the way he said them. Unhurried. Patient. Like he had nothing else in the world to attend to except her, out here, alone with him in her ear. Like guiding her through a task was something he could do all day. Like the sound of her breathing was a readout he was monitoring and the data was good and he wanted her to know.
He didn’t know he was doing it. She was almost sure he didn’t know. The teaching register and the other register lived in the same part of his voice and he couldn’t always tell which one he’d reached for.
“Third bolt,” he said. “You might need to apply a bit more pressure on this one. The threading’s tighter on the forward mounts. Just. Press in and hold it. Firm. Let it catch.”
She pressed. Held. The bolt caught. Her breath left her harder than it should have, and the suit picked it up and the channel carried it, and in the silence after she heard him register it. A tiny pause. The creak of the chair as he shifted.
“That’s good,” he said, and his voice was even lower now, and she did not think he was talking about the bolt anymore, or rather she thought he thought he was talking about the bolt but something underneath the words had come unmoored and was drifting. “Really good. One more. Take it slow.”
Take it slow. Her hands were shaking. The bolt was in her fingers and the stars were above her and his voice was in her ear telling her to take it slow and she was wet inside the suit, actually wet, and there was nowhere to put that information except in the same sealed chamber where his breathing lived.
She lined up the last bolt. Her fingers slipped. She re-seated it.
“Easy,” he said. Almost a murmur. “You’ve got it. Nice and slow. I’ll tell you when it’s there.”
She drove it in. Slowly. The threading caught, resisted, then gave, and the bolt sank home and she exhaled and his breathing was right there with hers, matched, like he’d been holding his breath along with her the whole time.
“There,” he said. Soft. Satisfied. “That’s perfect. You’re all done.”
A beat of silence.
Then another.
She could hear the moment it hit him. The sharp little intake of breath, the chair creaking as he sat up straighter. The sound of a man replaying the last two minutes in his head and hearing what she’d been hearing the whole time.
“Was that.” He stopped. Started again. His voice was different now. Higher. The warmth had been replaced by something startled and slightly panicked. “Okay, I need to. Can I ask you something?”
She pressed her forehead against the inside of her visor. The glass was cool. Clear. She could see the stars over the top of the hull and her own breath was doing nothing to them.
“Depends,” she said.
“Was that. What I just. The way I was.” He exhaled hard. “Is this weird? This. Right now. The comms. Is this weird for you? Because I just listened back to the last three minutes in my head and I. Hm. I did not sound like a flight controller.”
Her eyes were closed. Something in her chest was caught between a laugh and a freefall.
“No,” she said. “You didn’t.”
“What did I sound like?”
She said nothing. He knew. The silence told him.
“Oh,” he said. Quietly. Then: “Oh, no.” The chair creaked. She could picture him exactly. Leaned back, one hand dragging down his face, glasses getting shoved askew, the other hand gripping whatever he’d been fidgeting with. “Okay. I didn’t. I wasn’t doing that on purpose. I need you to know that. That was not. I was just talking you through the repair and then at some point my voice apparently decided to. Without consulting me. It just.”
“I know,” she said.
“You know?”
“It happened last time too.”
Silence. A long one. She could hear him breathing and she could hear the exact moment the implication of what she’d said landed, which was the moment his breathing changed.
“It happened last time,” he repeated. Slowly. Like he was looking at a result he’d been avoiding. “And you. Noticed.”
“Yes.”
“And you didn’t say anything.”
“What would I have said?”
Another silence. Longer. She could hear him thinking, which was unusual, because normally his mouth and his brain were on the same wire and there was no lag at all. When Ryland Grace went quiet it meant the thing he was processing was bigger than his usual buffer.
“I pulled the comms log,” he said. Different voice now. Not panicked. Not the teaching register. Something underneath both. “After last time. I told myself I was checking the thermal data but I listened to the whole thing and the thermal data was not what I was listening to.”
She gripped the edge of the panel housing.
“I know what you sound like when you’re concentrating,” he said. “And I know what you sound like when you’re not. And last time, there was a point where you stopped concentrating on the task and started concentrating on something else. And I noticed. And I didn’t stop talking.” A pause. She could hear him swallow. “And apparently I just did it again. Without even trying. Which means it’s not a choice, it’s a. It’s a reflex. My voice hears your breathing and it just. Goes there.”
Her breath was audible. She knew it was audible because the suit picked up everything and the channel was open and he was hearing it right now, the exact thing he was describing, happening live.
“I know what it does to you,” he said. Quieter. “The voice. The channel. I know because I heard it on the recording and I couldn’t stop thinking about it. The sound you made when I said ‘good girl’ was.” He stopped. “I have not been able to stop thinking about it. And I just spent three minutes doing it again without meaning to and you let me, and your breathing is doing the thing it does when you.”
“Ryland.”
“Yeah.” Barely a word. A vibration.
“I need to get back inside.”
“You do. You should.” Then, lower, so low she felt it in the base of her spine, and she didn’t know if this one was involuntary or not and she didn’t think he did either: “Come back in.”
Come back in. Two meanings. She heard both.
“Housing’s secure,” she said. “Heading back.”
“I’ll be here.” Then, after a beat, almost to himself but not quite: “I’ve been right here the whole time.”
The walk back was long. Not in distance. In the quality of the silence between them, which had changed texture and was now holding something that hadn’t been there on the way out. She moved along the hull and he tracked her on the console and neither of them spoke and it was the loudest quiet she had ever been inside. Her body was a problem she was going to have to solve in private, the suit holding in heat she could not account for on any readout, the slick gathering awareness between her legs that had nothing to do with exertion and everything to do with a man who had just discovered, live, on an open channel, that his voice went somewhere without him when she was the one listening.
The airlock cycled. She stepped in. Pressure normalised. Green lights. She pulled her helmet off and the ship air hit her face and she stood there for a moment with her eyes closed, breathing air that was not recycled through a small glass box three inches from her mouth.
He was not in the airlock bay.
He had been, last time. He’d been right there, hands on the clasp at her jaw, face close, and she’d had to hold very still while he disconnected her and his fingers moved and she had mapped the exact temperature of each one against her skin. He had stepped back then. Given her space.
She desuited alone. Hung the EVA gear in its locker. Went through the post-EVA checklist with her own hands and nobody else’s. Logged the panel swap. Noted the diagnostic result. Filed it.
Then she went back to her quarters and stood in the middle of the room and did not know what to do with herself.
The message from last time was still on her screen. She had not deleted it. She had also not re-read it, because re-reading it was a door and she had been standing in the frame for days.
Thermal line’s recalibrated. Should be good for next EVA. Sorry about the visor. For what it’s worth, you handled it really well.
She sat down on the edge of her bunk. Pressed her palms flat against her thighs. Thought about his voice dropping without his permission, going low and warm and deliberate while he walked her through bolt after bolt, and the exact moment he’d heard himself and panicked. My voice hears your breathing and it just goes there. A reflex, he’d called it. Not a choice. Something his body did when hers was listening. Thought about the wetness she could still feel between her legs and how she’d walked the length of the ship with it and he probably knew that too.
Twenty minutes passed. Maybe thirty. She was not counting, which was unusual, because she always counted. She counted steps to the lab, minutes between meals, the exact number of seconds it took his laugh to decay in a room. She was very good at counting and right now she was not doing it because the numbers were all wrong and she didn’t trust them.
Someone knocked.
It was a particular knock. Two quick, one slow. She’d heard it on the lab door, on storage bay panels, on the hull itself once when he was testing resonance because he’d had a theory about vibration frequencies and wanted to hear it for himself. It was a knock she would know in the dark. She did know it in the dark. Her quarters were not lit.
She got up. Her hand found the panel. The door opened.
He was standing in the corridor in a faded t-shirt that said CHEMISTRY JOKES ARE BORON and joggers and bare feet, which meant he had come from his quarters and had not stopped to put on shoes, which meant this was not a planned visit, which meant he’d gotten up and walked here before the part of his brain that edited impulses had caught up.
His glasses were askew. He had a look on his face like he’d been doing long division in his head and the answer had come out wrong in an interesting way.
“Hi,” he said.
“Hi.”
“So. I’ve been. Thinking. Which, I know, not breaking news, I’m always thinking, it’s sort of a persistent condition, but I’ve been thinking about. Specifically.” He pushed his glasses up. They went crooked in the other direction. “Can I come in?”
She stepped back.
He stepped in. The door closed behind him and now they were in her quarters together and the room was small and she was acutely aware of every object in it. Bunk. Desk. Chair. Her suit liner draped over the chair’s back. The screen with his message still on it, visible from where he was standing if he looked left, which he did, because he was Ryland and he looked at everything.
He saw it. She watched him see it.
“You kept that,” he said.
“I didn’t not delete it.”
“That’s. Yeah. That’s not the same as keeping it.” But he was smiling. Barely. A tilt at the corner of his mouth that she had catalogued across months of careful observation from across tables and labs and corridors and was now seeing from four feet away.
“What are you doing here?” she asked. Not unkindly. She needed the data.
“I’m. Okay.” He pressed his hands together in front of his mouth, the gesture he made when he was organising information. When he was about to teach something. “I’ve been running the numbers. On this. On us. And I know that sounds. I know you can’t actually run numbers on. But I’m me, so that’s how I. The point is, I arrived at a conclusion, and the conclusion is that I can’t actually keep pretending the conclusion is ambiguous, because it isn’t, it hasn’t been for a while, and I think you know that, and I think I knew you knew that when I sent that message, and I think we’re in a feedback loop that is not going to resolve by leaving it alone.”
She was standing very still. She could feel her pulse in her wrists.
“Also my voice apparently does things without my permission when you’re on comms and I can’t. I can’t unknow that. And I told you about the comms log and I’m not sorry I told you and I’m here because I’d rather be in this room dealing with the consequences than in my room pretending there aren’t any.”
“So you came to my quarters. At.” She glanced at nothing, because there was no clock where she looked. “Whatever time it is.”
“It’s 2340 ship time.”
“At 2340 ship time. Without shoes.”
He looked down at his feet. Looked back up. “Yeah, the shoes thing was. I was horizontal and then I was walking and the shoes just. They didn’t make the cut. I prioritised.”
“Prioritised.”
“Getting here. Before I talked myself out of getting here. Which I was going to do, for the record. I had a whole out prepared. I was going to tell myself that the EVA comms thing was just. Proximity and adrenaline and the channel doing something acoustic that. But it’s not. That’s not what it is. And I think you know that.”
“I know that,” she said.
He stopped. Everything stopped. The monologue, the fidgeting, the low-grade chaos of his energy filling the room. For one second he was completely still, and she understood that this was what it looked like when a joke was supposed to arrive and didn’t.
“Okay,” he said. Softly. “Okay, so. Now what.”
She didn’t answer. She closed the distance herself.
It was two steps. His back hit the door and her hands found his chest and his were at her waist before she registered that he’d moved, which meant his reflexes were faster than his editorial process, which she had suspected for months and was now confirming empirically.
“Oh,” he said, against her mouth. Not a word. A sound. Like he’d just observed something unexpected under a microscope and found it very, very interesting.
She kissed him and he tasted like recycled ship water and the peppermint gum he rationed like it was oxygen and he kissed her back immediately, no hesitation, no second-guessing, his hands pulling her in like he’d already solved the logistics of this and was just waiting for the experimental phase. His tongue found hers and the sound she made was involuntary and small and he swallowed it, pulled her closer, his fingers digging into her hips through her clothes.
His glasses pressed into her cheekbone. She reached up and took them off and he made a sound like she’d removed something structural.
“I can’t see,” he said.
“You don’t need to see.”
“Fair point. Very fair point. Excellent point.” He was talking into the kiss, words dissolving against her mouth, and she realised that this was what it was going to be like with him. That the monologue did not stop. That the thinking engine ran and ran and ran and the only way to change the output was to change the input.
She bit his lower lip. Gently. Experimentally.
The monologue stopped.
His hands tightened at her waist and then moved, one sliding up her spine and the other pulling her hips flush against his, and she could feel him already hard against her stomach, the specific undeniable shape of it through his joggers, and the sound he made was low and involuntary and she felt it everywhere. In her teeth. In the base of her spine. In the space behind her ribs where she’d been storing the sound of his voice for months, carefully, the way you store something volatile.
“I have thought about this,” he said, pulling back just far enough to breathe. His eyes were unfocused without the glasses, pupils blown, and he was looking at her like she was data he couldn’t quite believe. “A lot. More than is. Professionally appropriate. Or personally sustainable. I’ve thought about this a lot.”
“I know.”
“You know?”
“You’re not subtle.”
He laughed. A real one. The kind she’d heard through walls and across labs and once, memorably, from three compartments away when something in an experiment had surprised him. It broke open in the small room and she felt the last of her careful distance collapse like a structure that had been waiting for permission.
“I’m really not,” he said. “I’m really, really not.” And then he kissed her again, and this time there was no talking, just his hands and her hands and the slow, deliberate process of learning how another person worked.
She pulled his shirt up. He helped, arms tangling briefly because the room was small and he was clumsy and she was impatient, and then it was off and her palms were flat against his chest and he was warm. Warmer than the suit contact, warmer than the accidental brushes in the lab, warmer than anything her imagination had been able to construct in the weeks she’d spent not thinking about this while thinking about nothing else.
“Your turn,” he said, and his voice had dropped into that register. The one from the comms channel. The one that had started all of this, the patient, low, instructional tone that he used without knowing what it did and then, at some point, had started knowing.
She pulled her shirt off.
He looked at her. Not quickly, not with a glance he’d pretend was casual. He looked at her the way he looked at things that fascinated him. Openly. With his whole attention. Like she was a phenomenon he intended to understand completely.
“Wow,” he said, barely audible. Then, quieter: “Wow.”
“Is that a scientific assessment?”
“It’s a preliminary observation. I’ll need more data.” His hands came up and she thought he’d go for the obvious but he didn’t. He traced the line of her collarbone. Followed it from her shoulder to the hollow of her throat and then down, fingertips dragging over the swell of her breast, circling but not touching where she wanted him to. Mapping her. Learning the territory before committing to a direction.
“You’re doing the teacher thing,” she said. Her voice was thinner than she wanted it to be.
“What teacher thing.”
“Where you go slow so the student can keep up.”
His hand stilled against her ribs. She opened her eyes. He was looking at her with an expression she hadn’t seen before. Not the grin, not the deflection, not the curiosity. Something underneath all of that. The thing that lived under the noise.
“You keep up fine,” he said. Quietly. The way he’d said I’m really not on the comms. Bare.
Then his thumb dragged across her nipple and her breath caught and his eyes darkened, watching the reaction like it was the most important result he’d ever observed. He did it again. Slower. Circling, then a light pinch that made her gasp and press into his hand.
“There it is,” he murmured. “That sound. That’s the one.”
She kissed him again because she didn’t know what to do with that and he pulled her against him and they made it to the bunk through some combination of steps and stumbles, and she felt his shin connect with the frame and heard the short, bitten-off “ow, okay, that’s” and then they were down and the narrow mattress was not built for two people and neither of them cared.
He was over her, mouth on her throat, her collarbone, the space between her breasts. His hand found one and his mouth found the other and the wet heat of his tongue on her nipple made her arch into him so hard she almost lost contact with the mattress. He groaned against her skin, a vibration she felt in her ribs, and his hips pressed into hers and she could feel how hard he was, the full thick length of him pinned between their bodies, and she rolled up against it and the sound he made was ragged and desperate and nothing like a man who was in control of anything.
“You’re. You can’t just.” He was breathing against her breast, forehead pressed to her sternum, trying to assemble a sentence while she rocked against him. “I’m trying to take my time here. I have a whole. I had a sequence planned. You’re skipping ahead.”
“Your sequence is taking too long.”
“It’s thorough. I’m a thorough person. I have a scientific obligation to be.” She rolled her hips again and the sentence died. “Okay. Okay, you win. You win.”
His hands went to her waistband. Pulled her pants down, underwear with them, and then his palm was flat on her bare thigh and she was naked under him and the air in the room was cool against skin that was not cool at all. He looked down the length of her and his expression went slack for a second, completely unguarded, and she watched him lose a fight with himself in real time.
“You are.” He shook his head. “I’m not going to be able to be articulate about this. I need you to accept that I have a PhD and I am currently unable to form a complete sentence.”
His hand slid up the inside of her thigh. Slow. She let her legs fall open for him and his breath stuttered, audibly, on the comms-quality microphone of the two feet between his mouth and her ear.
His fingers found her and they both went still.
“You’re so wet,” he said. Low and wrecked and honest. “Is this. How long have you been like this? Since the EVA? Since I.”
“Since you told me you pulled the comms log.” Her voice was barely functional. “Since you told me you listened.”
His fingers slid through the slick of her, parting her, learning the shape of her with the same careful attention he gave everything that fascinated him. He found her clit and circled it once, lightly, testing, and her whole body tightened.
“Right here?” he asked. Not a guess. A confirmation.
“Yes. There. Right there.”
“Okay. Good. That’s.” His thumb settled into a rhythm, slow circles with exactly enough pressure, and then his fingers slid lower and one pushed inside her and she bit down on her own lip and his breath caught. “You make the best sounds. Has anyone ever told you that? You probably don’t want me to talk right now.”
“Don’t stop talking.”
He looked at her. Registered what she’d said. And she watched the understanding land, the data point connecting with every other data point he’d been collecting since the comms channel. The breathing, the silence, the way she’d fallen apart to nothing but his voice in her ear.
“Yeah?” Low. Lower than the comms. Lower than anything. “You want to hear me.”
She couldn’t speak. She nodded.
“Okay.” He added a second finger and curled them and she choked on air. His mouth came down to her ear, and he was right there, the same distance as the comms, the same frequency, the same voice but warmer and real and in the same room, and when he spoke she felt it through her whole body. “You’re so tight around my fingers. I can feel every time you clench. Right here.” He pressed deeper, curled again, found the spot that made her vision blur. “There. That’s the one. I can tell because you stop breathing for a second and then it comes back twice as hard.”
Her back arched off the bunk. Her hand found his wrist and held on.
“You’re close, aren’t you? I can tell. I’ve been listening to you for months and I know what you sound like when you’re trying to hold it together and I know what you sound like when you can’t.” His thumb kept circling her clit, his fingers kept that devastating rhythm inside her, and his voice was the third point of contact, the one that had always undone her. “Let go. I want to feel it. I want to feel you come on my hand and I want to hear what that sounds like when I’m in the room for it.”
She broke. Not gently. Not quietly. She came with his voice in her ear and his fingers inside her and her hand clenched around his wrist and the sound she made was loud enough that in any other context she would have been mortified but he was making a sound too, a low, shattered groan against her temple, and he was working her through it, not stopping, fingers and thumb keeping the rhythm while her body clenched and released and clenched around him.
“That’s it,” he breathed. “That’s it. You have no idea what you look like right now.”
She floated. Came back. His hand had stilled but not left, fingers still inside her, and his forehead was pressed against her temple, and he was breathing like he’d been running.
“Okay,” he said. Hoarse. “Okay. So. That was.”
“Don’t analyse it.”
“I’m not analysing it. I’m appreciating it. There’s a difference. One involves spreadsheets and the other involves lying here with my hand still inside you trying to remember how my cardiovascular system works.” He lifted his head. Looked at her. In the low light of her quarters, without his glasses, his face was open and stripped and slightly stunned. “You’re incredible.”
She reached for him. The waistband of his joggers, tugging them down, and he helped with the graceless urgency of a man who had been patient for exactly as long as his nervous system could sustain and had arrived at the limit. His cock was hard and flushed and when she wrapped her hand around it he hissed through his teeth and his hips jerked, one sharp involuntary thrust into her fist.
“Oh. That’s. Okay. That is.” He was propped on one arm and his head dropped forward and she could see his stomach muscles tighten as she stroked him, slow, root to tip, learning the weight and the heat and the specific way he throbbed in her hand. Thick. Hot. The skin velvet-soft and the shaft rigid beneath it. She ran her thumb over the head and it was slick already, leaking, and the sound he made was the sound of a man who had been thinking about this for weeks and was unprepared for the reality of it.
“I need to,” he started. “I should get. There might be. In my quarters, I have.”
“Implant,” she said. “I’m cleared. If you are.”
“I. Yes. Yeah. Clean bill. The pre-mission physicals were. They were very thorough. Uncomfortably thorough, actually, there was a whole thing with.” He closed his eyes. “I’m talking about medical exams right now. While you’re holding my. You’re holding my dick and I’m talking about medical exams.”
“It’s very you.”
“It’s really not my best work.” He kissed her. Hard, graceless, and she guided him between her legs and he settled against her, the length of him pressed along the wet heat of her, and when he rocked forward the drag of his cock through her folds made them both groan.
“Like this?” he asked, pressed against her entrance, barely there, trembling with the effort of not pushing in.
“Yes.”
He pushed into her slowly. One long, devastating slide, inch by inch, and she felt every part of it, the stretch and the fullness and the way her body opened around him and pulled him deeper. He was big enough that it ached at first, a bright, sweet sting that faded into pressure that faded into heat, and she exhaled and he exhaled and the sound he made into her mouth was the best thing she had ever heard. Better than the comms. Better than her name. A broken, shuddering breath that contained the ruins of every joke he’d ever used to keep distance.
He bottomed out. Held still. Buried in her to the hilt, his hip bones flush against the inside of her thighs, and she could feel him everywhere. The throb of him inside her. The weight of his body braced over hers. His heartbeat against her ribs, fast and real and here.
“Oh,” he said, very quietly. “You feel. I can’t. You’re so.” He pressed his face into her neck and breathed and she felt his cock twitch inside her and his whole body shudder. He held there. Not moving. Just breathing. Just feeling her. She could feel the effort of it in his arms, in the locked line of his shoulders, and she understood that he was trying to stay inside this moment without rushing through it. That he was paying attention the way he paid attention to everything that mattered to him.
She clenched around him. Deliberately.
His breath left him in a rush against her throat. She did it again.
“You’re mean. You’re a mean person. I want you to know that.” But his hips moved, a shallow rocking thrust that was less decision than reflex, and the friction of it dragged a sound out of her that made him do it again, harder.
He started to move. Slow at first, careful, long deep strokes that pulled almost all the way out and then sank back in, and each one pressed the head of his cock against the spot his fingers had found earlier and she couldn’t keep quiet. Every thrust punched a sound out of her that she couldn’t shape or control and he was cataloguing each one, she could see it in his face, the way his jaw tightened when she moaned, the way his rhythm shifted when she gasped.
“There,” she said. “Right there, don’t change anything, just.”
“Here?” He angled his hips and thrust and she nearly came off the mattress. “Yeah. There. I can feel it, you get so tight when I.” He did it again. “When I hit that spot you just.” He lost the sentence entirely.
His composure was cracking. She could hear it in his voice, the sentences getting shorter, the spaces between words getting wider. The monologue was failing and what was underneath it was raw and wrecked and honest.
“You feel so good,” he said, and it was the least complicated thing he’d said all night. No analogy, no deflection, no self-deprecating follow-up. Just the fact. “You feel so good I can’t think.”
She put her arm over her eyes.
It was instinct. Not a decision. She needed to stop seeing him so she could hear him, needed the dark behind her forearm to turn his voice back into the thing it had been in the suit, the thing it had been on the comms, close and disembodied and everywhere. The visual was too much. Too real. Too many inputs. She needed the channel. She needed just his voice.
He slowed. She felt it immediately, the rhythm dropping, his hips stilling halfway through a stroke.
“Hey,” he said. Soft. Careful. “Are you.”
“Don’t stop.” Her voice was wrecked. “Keep going. Keep talking. I just need to. I can’t look at you and hear you at the same time. It’s too much. I need to just hear you.”
A beat. She couldn’t see his face but she heard the breath he took, the sharp little catch of understanding. She heard the chair on the comms. She heard the EVA. She heard him put it together.
“Oh,” he said. Barely a sound. And then, lower, the register dropping back to the place it went when her breathing changed: “You want it like the channel.”
She nodded behind her arm.
He started to move again. Slower now. Deliberate. Each thrust deep and measured and she could feel every inch of him and the dark behind her arm was the dark inside the suit and his voice was right there, right in the space where it lived, where it had always lived.
“I’m right here,” he said. Close. His mouth near her ear, his weight over her, and the voice was the voice. The frequency. The low, warm, patient thing that had taken her apart through vacuum-sealed glass. “I’ve got you. Can you feel that? How deep I am? You’re taking all of me and you’re. The sounds you make when I’m all the way in. I’ve been thinking about those sounds for weeks. I used to sit in the lab and watch you across the room and wonder what you’d sound like if I.”
She made a sound. She didn’t know what it was. It came from somewhere below language and his hips snapped forward and the combination of the dark and his voice and the fullness of him inside her was the EVA and the comms and the suit all over again except he was real and warm and pressing her into the mattress and she was going to come apart.
“That’s it,” he said, and his voice was fraying. “Right there. You’re so close. I can feel you getting tighter and I can hear it in your breathing, the same way I could hear it on the channel, except now I can feel it too and it’s.” The sentence broke. His hips stuttered. “It’s so much better than I imagined and I imagined it a lot.”
She pulled him down with her free hand. Kissed him blind, her arm still over her eyes, finding his mouth by feel, and his sound against her lips was shattered and desperate. His pace picked up, harder now, the careful rhythm dissolving into something uncoordinated, his hips snapping into hers, and she could hear the slick wet sounds of their bodies meeting on every thrust and his breathing ragged and her own voice saying things she wouldn’t remember, his name and “harder” and “please” and “there, right there, don’t stop.”
“I’m close,” he said, strained. “I can’t. I’m going to.”
“Not yet.” She reached between them. Found her clit. Circled it with her fingers while he kept moving and the combination of both was too much and not enough and exactly right. Her arm was still over her eyes. She was in the dark with his voice and his body and her own hand and nothing else.
“Are you.” His rhythm stuttered when he realised what she was doing. She couldn’t see his face but she heard the sound he made, punched out of him. “You’re touching yourself. While I’m inside you. That is. That is the single best thing I have ever. In my whole life. Including the thing with the Astrophage. This is better. This is objectively better than discovery-level science.”
She would have laughed but her orgasm hit her like a system failure, sudden and total, her whole body locking tight around him, clenching in waves, and the sound she made was broken and loud and she felt it in her throat for hours afterward. He felt it too. She knew because his hips stuttered and his mouth opened on a sound that had no consonants in it.
“Oh. Oh, I can feel you. I can feel you coming. That’s.” His rhythm fell apart. Three more thrusts, deep and desperate and graceless, and then he buried himself to the hilt and came inside her with a groan that started in his chest and ended nowhere, just kept going, his cock pulsing inside her while his body shook and his hands gripped the sheets and he said her name into her neck in a voice she had never heard from him and would never forget.
She moved her arm. Opened her eyes. The light in the room was low and his face was right there, closer than she’d expected, and the expression on it was the most undefended thing she had ever seen on another person. Like he’d been taken apart and hadn’t started reassembling yet. Like she’d found the frequency under all his frequencies, the one he didn’t know he was broadcasting.
She held him through it. Hands on his back, feeling the aftershocks run through him, the small involuntary jerks of his hips as he emptied himself inside her. She could feel the warmth of it, the spreading fullness, and he was shaking and she was shaking and the small bed in her small quarters on the ship that was carrying them both through the incomprehensible dark held them anyway.
Silence. The real kind. Not the loaded, waiting silence of the comms channel but the thick, settling quiet of two people who had just stopped pretending and were lying in the aftermath of honesty.
He pulled out slowly. She felt the loss of him and then the slick mess of it, evidence, running down the inside of her thigh, and he looked down and his expression was something she filed away carefully. Possessive was the wrong word. Awed was closer.
He rolled onto his back. One arm slung over his face. She could see his chest moving. Could count his ribs in the low light if she wanted to. She wanted to.
“So,” he said, to the ceiling.
“So.”
“I came here to talk.”
“You did talk.”
“I did. I talked a lot. I talked during.” He moved his arm and looked at her. His hair was wrecked and his face was flushed and he looked like a man who had just had every equation he’d relied on for composure solved out from under him. “I talked during sex. That happened. I compared you to discovery-level science. While inside you. That is a thing that I said out loud.”
“I liked it.”
He stared at her. “You liked it.”
“I asked you not to stop.”
“You did. You did do that.” He was quiet for a second. Then: “Is it. I mean. This isn’t going to be a thing where tomorrow we pretend this was an anomalous result and go back to. Separate tables and looking at opposite walls and me talking about thermal conductivity to fill the silence because if I stop talking I’ll think about your breathing and if I think about your breathing I’ll.”
She put her hand on his chest. Over his heart. He stopped.
“It’s not an anomalous result,” she said.
He covered her hand with his. Pressed it there. His heartbeat was still fast under her palm, and he turned his head to look at her and his expression was the one from the comms, the bare one, the one under everything. The loneliness that looked like wonder when someone finally matched it.
“Okay,” he said. “Good. That’s. Good.” He exhaled. Long, slow, shaky. “I really like you. I should have. That’s what I came here to say, before the whole. I just really like you. As a scientist I feel obligated to state the hypothesis up front and I didn’t, so. For the record.”
She curled into him. His arm came around her. The ship hummed its low, constant hum, the frequency that lived beneath everything, that you stopped hearing until you listened for it.
“I know,” she said. “The signal was pretty clear.”
He laughed. Softly, into her hair. His arm tightened.
Prompt ide- Sensory deprivation, EVA edition. Suited up, comms cut to private channel, can’t see his face through the visor, voice is the only thing you get. Build the whole scene on audio and restricted movement.
Excellent prompt anon, thank you! You guys have blown up my inbox with the best ideas, I just can’t help myself from turning a few around straight away. Still open if anyone has more ideas!
Frequency
Ryland Grace/Female Reader | Mature | ~5k words
Tags: unresolved sexual tension, voice kink, praise kink, sensory deprivation, masturbation, EVA suits, she’s so normal about this (she is not normal about this), his voice is a problem, mutual pining, !GOOD GIRL!
Her visor ices over eleven minutes into the EVA. She can’t see. She can’t move. All she gets is Ryland Grace on a private comms channel, talking her through it, and he has no idea what “talking her through it” is doing to her. Or maybe he does.
[ Cross posted on Ao3 ]
The visor ices over on minute eleven.
Not all at once. It starts at the edges, a slow creep of crystalline white narrowing her field of vision like a camera iris closing. She watches it happen with the detached interest of someone who has read the manual on thermal regulation failure and knows this is a Category 2, not a Category 4. Annoying. Not fatal. She’ll lose visibility for a while. The suit’s internal heating will catch up eventually or it won’t, and either way she’s tethered, she’s mag-locked, she’s fine.
She’s fine.
“Uh oh,” says Grace, right in her ear.
His voice is close. That’s the thing about private comms. There’s no distance in them. He could be ten feet away on the hull or he could be sitting inside her helmet. The channel flattens everything into the same warm proximity, and his “uh oh” lands like he’s leaning over her shoulder.
And just like that, the careful architecture of the last few months collapses.
She figured it out early. Embarrassingly early. That his voice did something to her. And she did what any competent professional does with inconvenient information: she managed it. Kept a seat between them at briefings. Stayed on the other side of the lab when he was narrating his experiments to no one. Cultivated a careful, comfortable distance that let her enjoy him the way everyone enjoys him, the jokes, the warmth, the chaotic enthusiasm, without letting any of it get close enough to be a problem.
The distance worked. She’s had months of it working.
And now she’s mag-locked to the hull with a dead visor and nowhere to go and no seat to keep between them. Just his voice, filling her helmet like he’s pressed against her ear, and not a single thing she can do about it.
“I see it,” she says. “Thermal reg’s lagging.”
“Yeah, your whole visor’s going full Jack Frost. Very seasonal. Very festive. Totally useless for, you know, seeing things.”
“I can still see a little. Top left corner.”
“Top left corner. Great. You’ve got like a porthole. You’re a submarine now.”
She huffs a laugh. He keeps going, because of course he does.
“Okay. Okay, it’s fine, this happened to Olesya in sim training once and the fix was stupid simple. There’s a manual override on the thermal line. Left side of your chest plate, about four inches below the collarbone. Feel for a raised nub. Like a little bump.”
She reaches with her left hand. Glove on suit, zero finesse. It’s like trying to find a light switch wearing oven mitts.
“Little lower,” he says. “No, your lower. Yeah. Feel that?”
“Maybe?”
“It’s basically like a circuit breaker. Same concept. Push, click, wait. The heating element resets and the ice should start clearing in, I don’t know, four or five minutes.”
She pushes. Something gives under her fingertip with a faint snick.
“There you go,” he says. “Perfect.”
Her stomach does something small and stupid at the word. She ignores it. She’s a professional. She’s floating in the vacuum of space doing hull repair and she is not going to have a reaction to the word “perfect” said in a completely neutral context by a man who probably also calls his breakfast perfect when the eggs come out right.
“Now we wait,” he says.
“Now we wait,” she agrees.
The ice is not clearing fast. Her visor is almost fully opaque now, a featureless white with the barest suggestion of light filtering through. She can’t see the ship. She can’t see the stars. She can’t see Grace, who is somewhere out here with her, close enough to talk but invisible. She’s standing on the hull of a spacecraft in a white room made of frost, and the only proof she’s not alone is the sound of his breathing in her ear.
He hums. A low, tuneless thing, barely there, the kind of sound someone makes when they’re concentrating and don’t know they’re doing it.
“What are you working on over there?” she asks.
“Panel three. The seal is being a baby about it. I have to. Hold on.” A grunt. The faint scrape of a tool. “I have to kind of lever it from underneath and sweet-talk it at the same time. Come on. Come on. Okay, right, it’s like. Imagine you have a jar of pickles, but the jar is bolted to the outside of a spaceship and you’re wearing the world’s worst gloves and the pickles are actually mission-critical.”
“You’re comparing the relay seal to pickles.”
“I’m comparing the relay seal to pickles. This is what you get when you put a teacher in a spacesuit. Everything becomes an analogy.”
She should not find this charming. It is objectively absurd. He is talking about pickles while she stands blind on the skin of a ship travelling through interstellar space, and the fact that it makes her smile is her own problem.
“There,” he says. “Okay. Okay, that’s. Nope. That’s not. Hold on.”
A clatter. A scrape. A very soft “dammit.”
“Did you just drop something?”
“I didn’t drop it. It escaped. There’s a difference. It made a unilateral decision to leave my hand.”
“So you dropped it.”
“It’s mag-tethered, it’s fine. It’s like seven inches away. I just have to. Reach. Without. Overbalancing.”
A pause. A longer scrape. A whispered “come here, you little-.” Then a satisfied exhale.
“Got it?”
“Got it. Okay. Right. Where were we.”
She doesn’t answer. She’s listening to him breathe. It’s even and focused, a rhythm she can track even through the comms compression. In, out. In, out. A slight catch when he reaches for something. A longer exhale when he settles into a task.
She becomes aware, gradually and then all at once, that she has nothing to look at. Nothing to do. The visor is a wall of white. Her job right now is to stand still and wait for her suit to fix itself, and her entire sensory world has narrowed to the sound of Ryland Grace doing maintenance.
Every sound is in her ear. The small muttered commentary. The pause while he thinks. The “okay” that means he’s about to start something, soft and purposeful, like he’s cuing himself. She can hear him swallow. She can almost hear him blink.
“Hey, question,” he says. “When they designed these comms, do you think they knew they were basically building the world’s most intimate walkie-talkie? Because I can hear you breathing and it’s kind of like being at a sleepover.”
“You can hear me breathing?”
“Yeah. It’s fine. It’s nice, actually. Like company.”
Something warm moves through her chest. She files it under “suit temperature normalizing” and does not examine it further.
He starts narrating again. He can’t not. It’s pathological, the way he talks through his own process, a running monologue half-addressed to her and half-addressed to the universe at large. She catches fragments. Something about the relay coupling being “weirdly elegant, actually, look at this join, whoever designed this was having a good day.” Something about heat distribution and molecular blah blah blah. She loses the science. She keeps the voice.
He has a good voice. She’s noticed it before, objectively, the way you notice that a colleague has nice hands or a pleasant laugh. It’s warm without being deep, animated without being loud. It goes faster when he gets excited and drops lower when he’s concentrating, and right now he’s alternating between the two, bouncing from discovery to focus and back, and it’s. Fine.
It’s fine.
“Okay, I need you to do something for me,” he says.
“Sure.”
“There’s a secondary valve on your right hip. Same deal as before, feel for it. It’s about the size of a quarter. Twist counterclockwise, quarter turn.”
She reaches. Her right glove finds the curve of the suit at her hip and presses, searching. Nothing. She shifts her hand, tries again.
“Little further back,” he says. “Yeah. Think back pocket.”
Her fingers catch on something raised. She twists.
“Good,” he says, and the word drops into the low, pleased register he uses when a student gets it right on the first try.
She does not close her eyes. She was not going to close her eyes. She happened to close her eyes.
“Did it click?” he asks.
“It clicked.”
“Good. That’s the secondary thermal line. Should speed things up. You’re doing great.”
You’re doing great. Said offhandedly, the way he’d tell a thirteen-year-old they nailed a titration. There is no reason for it to hit the way it hits. No reason at all for the warmth to spread from her chest down through her stomach and settle somewhere below it, a slow heavy pulse that has absolutely nothing to do with suit temperature regulation.
She stands very, very still.
He keeps working. The sounds layer on top of each other. A wrench being seated. Bolts turning. His breath, slightly labored now from exertion, coming in shorter pushes. An occasional grunt of effort that is just sound, just a person working, and is under no obligation to be anything else.
“Almost got it,” he mutters. “Come on. Just a little more. Right. There.” A long, satisfied exhale. “Oh, that’s nice. That’s really nice. Look at that seal. That’s gorgeous.”
He is talking about metalwork. She is going to die.
“How’s the visor?” he asks.
“Still white.”
“Hmm. Okay. Give it another minute.” He pauses. “You doing okay in there? Claustrophobic at all? Because I can keep talking. I mean, I’m going to keep talking regardless, that’s not really a voluntary thing for me, but I can talk at you if you need it.”
“I’m fine.”
“You sure? Because your breathing just changed.”
She feels a spike of something cold cut through the warmth. “What?”
“It’s quicker than it was a minute ago. Just slightly. I’m not. I notice stuff. Occupational hazard. Teacher brain. If a kid’s breathing changes in my classroom I clock it before they do.”
“I’m fine,” she says again, and this time she concentrates on making her breathing even, steady, controlled. Normal. She is breathing normally.
“Okay,” he says, easy. “Just checking.”
He goes quiet for a moment. She hears him shift, the fabric-on-fabric sound of his suit adjusting as he moves to a new section of the hull. Then he starts up again, softer this time, almost idle.
“You know what’s wild? Sound doesn’t travel in space. Like, obviously, we all know that, there’s no medium. But when you’re out here, your brain keeps expecting it to. I keep waiting to hear the hull creak, or the bolt clank, and there’s just. Nothing. Everything I hear is either inside my own suit or through this channel. So it’s either me or you. That’s the whole soundtrack.”
“Just us,” she says, and she should not have said it like that.
“Just us,” he repeats, and she cannot read his tone, because she cannot see his face, because the visor is a wall, and his voice is the only data she has.
Silence. Three seconds. Four. Five. She counts them because counting is better than the alternative.
“Okay,” he says. “Panel four. Last one. Then we go in.”
“Great.”
“Going to need your help on this one. I need you to hold something for me. Reach straight out, left hand, about shoulder height. I’m going to put a coupling in your hand.”
She extends her arm. Holds it there. Waiting, blind, suspended.
His glove touches hers.
She feels it through the suit. Barely. A ghost of pressure, the dull impression of contact through two layers of insulated material. He’s guiding the coupling into her palm, adjusting her grip, and even through the gloves she can feel how careful he’s being. Precise. Patient.
“Close your fingers. Not too tight. Right. Hold that right there.”
She holds it.
“Don’t move.”
She doesn’t move.
“Good girl,” he says, and then immediately, “I mean. Good. That’s. Yep.”
The correction comes half a second too late. The original lands first. It lands in her ear and in her chest and at the base of her spine and in a place she is absolutely not going to name while she is standing on the hull of a spacecraft on a mission that cost more than some countries’ GDPs.
Her breathing changes. She knows it changes because she can hear it, inside her own helmet, the slight quickening she cannot swallow down fast enough. And he can hear it too. She knows he can hear it because he goes quiet.
Not a natural pause. Not a thinking pause. A pause where someone is recalculating.
The silence lasts four seconds. She counts.
“Okay,” he says, and his voice is different. A fraction lower. A shade more deliberate. “Hold still for me.”
There it is. The shift. So slight she could convince herself she imagined it if it weren’t for the fact that every nerve ending in her body has just recalibrated to the frequency of his voice.
He goes back to working. She can hear the tool in his hands, the small efficient sounds of the repair. But the narration has changed. It’s slower. He’s choosing his words.
“Just a little more. Almost there. Stay right where you are.”
She stays.
“That’s it. Just like that.”
Her fingers are trembling inside the glove. She can feel her own pulse in her palm where she’s gripping the coupling. Her jaw is locked. Every exhale is a controlled, deliberate act.
“Easy,” he says, and his voice is so close and so low and so warm that it might as well be a hand on the back of her neck. “You’re doing so good.”
The double beat of the praise. So good. Not “great.” Not “perfect.” So good. Like she’s accomplished something. Like he’s proud of her. Like she’s earned it. She swallows and the sound is loud in her own helmet and she prays the mic doesn’t pick it up.
He heard it. She knows he heard it because the next thing he says is, “Breathe.”
One word. Quiet. Not a question, not a tease. An instruction.
She breathes.
“Good,” he says, and her vision whites out in a way that has nothing to do with the frost.
He works in silence for a while after that. Thirty seconds. A minute. She can’t tell. Time has gone strange and liquid and she is just standing here, blind, holding a piece of hardware in her shaking hand, listening to him breathe, and every breath sounds like something she shouldn’t be hearing.
“Okay,” he says finally. “Done. You can let go.”
She uncurls her fingers. Lets the coupling go. Hears him catch it.
“Let’s head back.”
She follows the sound of his mag-boots. Step, clunk, step, clunk. A slow rhythm leading her across the hull toward the airlock. She walks blind, trusting the tether, trusting the path, trusting his voice when he says “slight step up here” and “little to the left” and “right through here, you’re good.”
The airlock opens and closes. Pressurization. The hiss of atmo returning. Her ears pop.
Neither of them says anything.
The visor starts to clear. The ice retreats from the edges inward, her vision returning in expanding arcs. First the ceiling of the airlock, the yellowish emergency lighting. Then the walls. Then him.
He’s standing three feet away. Helmet still on. She can see his face through his visor and he looks exactly like he sounds, which is a thought that should mean nothing and means everything. Slightly flushed. Eyes bright. Mouth set in a line that’s trying to be casual and not quite landing.
He reaches up and releases his helmet seal. Lifts it off. His hair is mashed flat and his glasses are fogged and he looks like a man who has been doing spacewalk maintenance for two hours, which he has, and absolutely nothing else, which is a lie.
“Your turn,” he says. “Come here.”
She can’t get the seal. Her hands are still shaking. Gloves, nerves, the whole situation. She fumbles it twice and then his hands are there, bare now, working the clasp at her chin. His fingers brush the underside of her jaw and she stops breathing entirely and he definitely notices and neither of them says a word about it.
The helmet comes off. Cool air hits her face. She blinks, adjusting to unfiltered light for the first time in over an hour.
He’s looking at her.
He is looking at her with an expression she has never seen on his face before. It’s quiet. It’s almost careful. It is so far from the grin, from the jokes, from the deflection, that she feels something twist in her chest at the sight of it.
“You okay?” he asks, and his voice sounds different without the comms. Thinner. Realer. The intimacy of the channel is gone and in its place is just air and three feet of space and his actual eyes on her actual face.
“I’m fine,” she says. Third time. Getting less convincing.
He holds her gaze for one more second. Then the grin starts. Right on schedule. Half a second before it has any business showing up, his mouth curves, and it’s wry and warm and slightly crooked and he says, “You did good out there.”
Same words. He says them the way he said them on the channel. Low. Knowing. Looking right at her. And she feels it land in every place it landed before, except now she can see his face while it happens, and she was right. This is worse.
“Thanks,” she manages.
He nods. Steps back. Starts stripping out of the rest of the suit, all business, struggling with a boot seal and muttering “come on, come ON” at it, and just like that the normal version of him reassembles around whatever that was.
She turns. Walks to the interior hatch. She doesn’t run. Walking. Normal walking. She is walking normally.
“Hey,” he calls after her.
She stops.
“Your visor should be fine for next time. I’ll recalibrate the thermal line tonight.”
“Thanks, Grace.”
“Any time.”
She does not look back. She walks through the hatch, down the corridor, past the lab, past the mess, past the storage bay, all the way to her quarters. The door slides shut behind her. The lock engages.
She leans back against it and presses both hands to her face.
Quiet. The ship hums around her. The air circulation system pushes a gentle current across her forearms where she’s rolled back the suit underlayer. She is alone for the first time in over two hours.
The replay starts immediately.
She doesn’t choose it. It just begins, like a recording someone queued up while she wasn’t paying attention. His voice, layered and close, unspooling in order from the beginning. Uh oh. The warmth. The ease. I can hear you breathing and it’s kind of like being at a sleepover.
She pushes off the door and sits on the edge of her bunk. Her hands are still trembling. She presses them flat against her thighs and breathes out, long and unsteady.
Good.
It comes back first. That word. The first one, the one that was innocent, or should have been. The pleased, offhanded “good” he gave her when she found the valve on the first try. She hadn’t reacted to it. Not visibly. But her body had filed it somewhere, logged the frequency, tuned itself to it without asking permission.
You’re doing great.
Her fingers curl against her thighs.
Hold still for me.
She closes her eyes.
The thing about being blind in the suit was that every word had texture. She couldn’t flatten his voice by seeing his expression, couldn’t dilute it by watching his hands or reading his body language. There was just the sound, rich and close, filling up her helmet. Every breath and pause and half-laugh had landed on bare nerves with nothing in between.
Good girl.
She exhales sharply. Tips her head back against the wall.
He’d corrected himself. Almost fast enough. Not quite. And the correction had been worse than the slip, because the correction meant he’d heard it leave his own mouth and known what it sounded like and understood, in that instant, exactly what was happening.
And then he’d kept going.
Hold still for me. That’s it. Just like that. Easy.
Slower. Lower. Every word placed with a precision she associates with him doing actual science. He’d been running the experiment. Testing the hypothesis. Watching the data, which was her breathing, which was the only thing she couldn’t control.
You’re doing so good.
She makes a sound into the quiet of her quarters. Small, bitten off, barely there. Her hand has moved from her thigh to the hem of her shirt and she is not going to pretend she doesn’t know where this is going. She knew where it was going when she closed the door. She knew where it was going before that, when his fingers brushed her jaw, when he looked at her with that expression she’d never seen before, the one with no grin and no joke and no armour in it at all.
She pulls the suit underlayer down to her waist. The air is cool against her skin. She can still feel the ghost of the suit’s pressure, phantom constriction around her ribs and shoulders, like the memory of being held still. Her nipples are already hard. That happened somewhere on the hull and never stopped.
She runs her thumb across one, lightly, and the sharpness of it makes her hips shift against the mattress. She does it again. Slower. The way he’d slowed down.
Stay right where you are.
His voice, replaying, closer than it has any right to be. She can hear the exact moment it changed. The fraction of a second where his brain caught up to the data and made a decision, not to stop, but to be careful about it. To be deliberate. To speak to her like he knew she was listening with her whole body.
She pushes the underlayer the rest of the way off, kicks it to the floor. Lies back. The sheets are cool and slightly rough against her bare skin and the contrast after two hours sealed inside that suit is almost too much on its own, every nerve ending dialed up and oversensitive. She runs a hand down her own stomach, fingers spread, and her muscles tighten under the touch.
Hold still for me. That’s it. Just like that. Easy.
Her hand slides between her legs and the sound she makes is not small this time. It’s low and open and honest, pulled out of her by the first real pressure after an hour of deprivation. She’s wet. She’s been wet since “good girl,” probably, and the acknowledgment of that sends a fresh pulse of heat through her.
She finds a rhythm. Slow. Matching the pace of his voice in her memory, the deliberate, careful cadence he’d used when he figured it out. Two fingers pressing and circling and pressing again, and she can feel how swollen she is under her own touch, how close to the surface everything has been sitting this whole time.
Breathe.
She breathes. Ragged now. Not hiding it. Not performing it. Just her own sounds in her own room, graceless and real, her hips rocking up against her hand in a rhythm she’s not controlling anymore.
She thinks about his hands. Bare, after the gloves came off, working the clasp at her chin. The brush of his fingers against her jaw. How close his mouth had been. She thinks about what it would sound like if he were here, that voice not in her ear through a channel but against her throat, low and warm and saying those words directly into her skin.
You’re doing so good.
Her back arches. Her free hand twists in the sheet.
She’s close. She’s been close since she lay down, maybe since the airlock, maybe since the moment he said her name on the hull in a voice she’d never heard before. All of it has been foreplay. Every word, every careful instruction, every praise that landed somewhere it wasn’t aimed. Two hours of it with no release and no relief and now there’s nothing between her and the edge but her own hand and his voice on repeat.
She speeds up. Two fingers slick and insistent, the heel of her palm grinding against her clit, and her thighs are trembling the way her hands trembled in the suit. She is making sounds she would be embarrassed about if she had the capacity for embarrassment right now, which she does not, because all of that burned off somewhere around just like that.
That’s it.
So good.
She comes hard. Harder than she expected. It hits in a long wave that locks her whole body tight, her hand pressed flat between her legs, her mouth open on a sound that starts as his name and ends as just breath. It goes on. Rolls through her in slow, heavy contractions that she rides with her fingers still moving, gentler now, drawing it out because it’s still going and she doesn’t want it to stop.
A second peak catches her off guard, smaller but sharper, pulling a gasp out of her that she feels in her teeth. Then another. She’s oversensitive now, trembling, her own touch almost too much, but she keeps her hand there and lets it ebb at its own pace. Each aftershock tugs his voice back through her. Good. That’s it. Easy. A feedback loop she can’t switch off and doesn’t try to.
When it finally releases her she goes boneless. Lies there with her hand still cupped loosely between her thighs, her chest heaving, sweat cooling on her stomach. She stares at the ceiling. Her pulse is everywhere. She can feel it in her throat and her fingertips and the soles of her feet.
The quiet settles around her slowly, like silt in water. She breathes. She keeps breathing. Her body feels wrung out and new at the same time, like something structural has shifted and is not going to shift back.
The ship hums. The air circulates. Somewhere on this vessel, Ryland Grace is recalibrating a thermal line and probably talking to himself while he does it. Muttering “okay, right” and narrating his own hands and having no idea, or every idea, about what he just did to her from ten feet away without touching her once.
She pulls herself together. Fixes her clothes. Washes her face in the small sink. Looks at herself in the mirror and meets her own eyes and thinks, very clearly: this is going to be a problem.
Her tablet pings.
She picks it up. A message from Grace. Timestamped three minutes ago.
Thermal line’s recalibrated. Should be good for next EVA. Sorry about the visor. For what it’s worth, you handled it really well.
She reads it twice.
It’s a perfectly normal message. There’s nothing in it. “You handled it really well” is a thing colleagues say to each other. It’s professional. It’s kind. It is also, unmistakably, praise, and the fact that he chose to send it. That he sat somewhere on this ship after everything that happened on that channel and decided those were the words.
He might not know. He might just be being nice. He might be Ryland Grace, who tells everyone they did great, who hands out “good” and “perfect” like they cost nothing.
But he might know.
She types back: Thanks, Grace. See you tomorrow.
She puts the tablet down. Picks it up again. Reads his message one more time.
You handled it really well.
She sets it down. Stares at the ceiling. Laughs, once, at nothing, at everything, and presses her fingers to her mouth.
The frequency is still live.
--
let me know what you think and maybe we can all be good girls together
imagine I'm mindlessly perusing my notifications, and then the author of orbital resonance follows me 🗿 HELLO?????
like hi ive spent hours reading ur fic when i should be writing my final research paper and im obsessed w ur writing style
I love this for you, I am very very happy that you have enjoyed it so far and I’ll take a little pride in being a distraction for you. Good luck for your paper, and I’ll see you over on my other account for fic updates and future distractions! @girlwhorunswithwolves
Three years of rivalry. Countless late-night debates. One grenade of a paper that just rewrote the rules of habitability. At the department party, the tension between you and Grace Ryland finally boils over.
What begins as another sharp-tonged argument in the seminar rooms spills into the empty corridor, where words run out and bodies take over.
Hate sex, academic style.
__
Let me know if you like it, because I have an idea for what could happen next…
Okay… so this grew like 8 legs and has run away in the last few weeks.
It’s not a 1 shot anymore.
It’s a full 2 part fic, currently being updated daily, with a word count of over 100k words…
If you wanna come hang on my other account where I’m posting updates, find me at @girlwhorunswithwolves for chapter updates and other fun things. Otherwise, I’ll leave this account alone as a personal archive of my early 20’s - something that feels a lifetime ago from this point.
Three years of rivalry. Countless late-night debates. One grenade of a paper that just rewrote the rules of habitability. At the department party, the tension between you and Grace Ryland finally boils over.
What begins as another sharp-tonged argument in the seminar rooms spills into the empty corridor, where words run out and bodies take over.
Hate sex, academic style.
__
Let me know if you like it, because I have an idea for what could happen next…
*me plugging in my phone in the dark* dont think about it dont think about it dont think about it dont think abotu it dont thinka botu it donmt think aboiut it dont think about it dont think abotu it dont thihnk about it dont think about it dont think about it dojnt think abtiou it dont thi
