[COLLAR]: sender grabs receiver by the collar to pull them closer — for caleb ofc. :^)
𝐊𝐈𝐍𝐃𝐀 👀 𝐏𝐑𝐎𝐌𝐏𝐓𝐒
@braskide ! miss Yuna !!
It was nearing dawn when he woke from the shitty cat nap he convinced himself to take while he waited. Checked his phone, then checked the rooms, then checked the perimeter. Still no sign of her.
He'd promised her privacy. Whatever that meant. Turning off his tracking, giving her a few hours to herself where she didn't have to worry about the responsibility of decorum. To not be safeguarded and sheltered. Some sort of existential crisis of personhood that really could not have any less sense, given the constant threat surrounding her as a prominent political figure. The need for security was just part and parcel to the job.
As head of her security, he'd understood it to be an expected reaction to full time surveillance. Anyone would grow sick of it. Of course. But it didn't mean that a request of that nature would have been feasible. Or even considerable. But Caleb couldn't help feeling that the rejection wasn't of his position. Maybe it was, superficially. But he took it personally when her eyes flashed desperate and defiant at him when she demanded her nights of freedom. Something more than the weariness of the world closing in on her. It felt personal. Anger, not frustration—enfolded and engaged upon him. As if it wasn't his job to protect her. As if every irritating protocol he'd enacted as head of her security was just some unreasonable caprice to keep her under his thumb.
Is that what she'd thought of him? Bad enough he'd endured the years of silent yearning since they were young, the rejection of the single time she'd ever deigned to requite him, and all the times his life had been put on the line—not for any need for anything further than knowing the girl he loved for all his life was safe. But was even that too much to have dared to want? Sure, maybe he didn't take the request well the first, second or even fifth time she asked then demanded it of him. Maybe they didn't have to devolve into heated words and raised voices. But he didn't understand being pushed away. Was his endurance not the same as devotion?
He didn't know what was on her mind anymore. He didn't know what she wanted from him. If she even wanted him at all.
An alert on the comm he wore on his wrist, then another that lit up his phone screen: movement at the gates. Definitely her car on the monitor. He could see her frantically running a hand through her hair, checking her lipstick in the rearview mirror. Like some teenager ready for her parents' censure. But she walked into her own house with purposed steps, eyes trained down the hall she intended to traverse without a single glance his way.
"Hey," he called. Of course she ignored him. Par for the course between them lately. Which he might have ignored, if he hadn't been up worrying for hours, during which time he'd ruminated upon the state of their ... whatever this was. Wasn't ever quite a relationship. But 'friendship' felt irreverent to what they had between them. And it was that liminal fucking limbo that had him following after her, taking up her pace until he could catch her by the arm. "Where have you been?"
"I thought you weren't supposed to ask," Yuna reasoned, exasperated, carefully dislodging her arm from his grip. "Wasn't that our deal?"
"I'm not asking as your employee, Yuna," Caleb shot back. "Unless you just don't give a shit about me as a friend to leave me fucked up and worried about you." Friend. That was a hard swallow.
Yuna's eyes narrowed into something withering. "Friends trust each other."
Christ, it was like a shot in the heart. Caleb's hand, still warm from her touch, drops helplessly to his side. "姐姐," he implores, pointedy.
She laughs, furious. "Don't," she warns, turning on her heel and stalking down the hall to her rooms. But she's easy to fall into step with, and in a few strides he's caught her arm again. This time, she whips around, purse and coat are discarded upon the floor, her hands freed to reach for his collar and pull him down the bared length of her pale throat. "I don't know what you want to hear from me, and don't say you want the truth," Yuna hissed against the hard line of his jaw, aware of his nose buried now in her neck. "You know where I go. I know you still track my phone, my car... You know who I'm seeing. Do you really want me to spell it out for you? You're either dense or a masochist, but either way, this should answer you. And I don't think this should need any further discussion."
Yuna's neck bore bruises of brutish fingertips, imprints of teeth marks whose aftermath bloomed berry-red; her skin wore the heaviness of a dark, cimerrian oud and a cologne that sent him reeling as his nerves recalled a sensory-memory nightmare.
The terror it invoked, the uncertainty and doubt was nearly ancestral in his veins when it surged like a tide, flooding the sinews beneath his skin. His teeth bore into her throat, determined to rewrite whatever imprint he dares leave on her, knowing he lived in the memory of her skin, subrosa to anything his rival might have attempted to make indelible.
Yuna made a soft sound of displeasure, but her hands never left off where her finger knotted within the fabric of his shirt, holding him close as much as she held herself to him. "Don't," came her warning, through serrated breaths. "You don't have the right, remember? You gave that up when you gave me up—"
Bit her again, harder. Wondered if he imagined the snap of her pierced skin. "Never gave you up," he shot back, darkly. He felt her struggle against his chest, trying her best to slip away from the immurement of his mechanical arm holding her to him, his other hand hiking up her skirt. "Neither did you. I know you haven't." His hand smoothed over her ass and slipped between her thighs. "See?"
His teeth threaten the silken plush of her cheek. "Tell me you fucking hate it, 姐姐. Look me in the eye when you do. Make me believe it. Maybe I'll let you go. But I'll never give up on you. If all I have to be is patient, then I'll be a venerable— I'll live like a saint if that makes me worthy of you. I've waited a lifetime, Yuna. I can wait hundreds more."