Good Behavior - Captain Rex x Reader (18+ MDNI)
Summary: I read @tanobatcher's sub!Rex hcs and what was supposed to be a quick 2k word oneshot based on one of them turned into this mix of serveral hcs. I have no excuses. Come get y'all slop!!
Rated: Explicit
Word Count: 13k+
Warnings: Established relationship, sub!rex, Rex has a praise kink, femdom reader if you squint, Rex calls you "Ma'am" 🤤🤤, unprotected PinV sex, multiple orgasms, save a horse ride a clone trooper. No beta, we die like fives.
AN: First time writing for StarWars kinda nervous....
Rex had made it two steps into your apartment before you caught the back of his belt and hauled him through the door like you had every right in the galaxy to drag a captain of the 501st by his kit.
The door hissed shut behind him with a soft hydraulic seal, cutting off the distant noise from the upper Coruscant landing platform and leaving only the low hum of your apartment’s air filtration system, the muted rush of traffic beyond the windows, and the hard sound of Rex’s boots adjusting against your polished floor before he could trip over the edge of the entry mat. He caught himself with one hand on the narrow console by the door, helmet tucked under his arm, blond hair still flattened from the bucket, a dark smear of carbon scoring cutting across the side of his neck where his armor had failed to keep the blast residue out. He smelled like rain off the platform, ship coolant, bacta, and the stale heat of armor worn too long.
You still had your Senate robes on.
You had sat through three hours of committee testimony with silk wrapped around your throat, jeweled pins biting into your hair, and Senator Burtoni’s voice scraping across your nerves while your comm remained silent under your palm. Silent after the Resolute dropped out of hyperspace. Silent after Anakin sent one useless line to Obi-Wan that said the 501st had returned intact, which could have meant anything from “everyone is alive” to “Rex is standing through internal bleeding because he’s stupid.” Silent until Jesse, Maker bless his loose tongue and nonexistent sense of timing, passed by the corridor outside the Senate chamber and mentioned to one of Fox’s men that the captain had been back planetside for nearly an hour.
An hour. An entire hour. And Rex had not come to you.
So, yes, maybe you had dismissed your Guard detail with a smile that made Thorn immediately look worried, maybe you had stepped into the rain-slick docking lane before Thire finished protesting, maybe you had crossed half the government district in formal robes and impractical shoes just to arrive at the GAR transit wing in time to see Rex walking toward the barracks lift with a fresh split at his lower lip and a limp he was pretending did not exist. He saw you and stopped.
You stared at him from across the platform while rain hissed against hot durasteel and ran in thin silver lines down the plastoid of his armor.
Rex’s shoulders went rigid beneath his pauldron. Then, like an idiot, he said, “General.”
You didn’t answer him until you got him home.
Now, he stood in your entryway with his helmet under one arm, looking around your apartment like he had never seen it before, even though he knew the exact loose floor panel near the sitting area, the way the left balcony door stuck in humid weather, the drawer where you kept spare wraps and the cabinet where you shoved anything you didn’t want Obi-Wan seeing when he came over to be polite and unbearable. He tracked the room anyway. Door. Window. Balcony. Refresher hall. Bedroom. Secondary exit through the service corridor. He did all of that before he looked at you properly.
That made your jaw tighten.
“You are not doing a security sweep right now,” you said, yanking the wet outer layer of your robe off your shoulders and tossing it over the back of the nearest chair with enough force that the chair skidded half an inch across the floor.
Rex’s eyes flicked to the chair.
Do not, you thought, staring him down.
He set his helmet on the console with too much care, like if he handled everything gently enough, you would forget you had dragged him in here angry. The blue paint on the dome had new scratches, one deep enough to show the pale underlayer beneath. Your eyes snagged on it before you could stop them. Rex saw. Of course he saw. His gloved fingers came up, turning the helmet slightly so the damaged side faced the wall.
Oh, that was cute. Not cute enough to save him.
“You walked past me,” you said, each word too even to count as a shout and too sharp to count as anything else.
His hand stayed on the helmet. “I had debrief.”
“You had debrief,” you repeated, stepping out of the first shoe and nudging it aside with your toe. The gold heel hit the baseboard with a small, expensive-sounding knock. “Then you had medbay, I assume, because Kix would have shot you before letting you leave the ship like that. Then you had enough time to get on a transport, land in the Senate district, and head for the barracks lift with your kit still half-burned, but somehow not enough time to send me two words.”
Rex’s thumb rubbed once over the rim of his helmet before he made himself stop. “I was going to.”
His gaze dropped to the floor between you, and that alone almost made you angrier, because Rex did not look away on battlefields. Rex did not flinch from cannon fire, did not blink when Anakin improvised something suicidal over comms, did not break eye contact with admirals trying to speak down to him like his rank didn’t count because Kamino had assigned it with a number. But you put him in your apartment after an hour of silence, and suddenly the floor needed his attention.
“I was going to come here after I cleaned up,” he said, voice low enough that it almost sank under the ventilation hum. Your hand went still at the clasp of your waist sash. There it was. The stupid, miserable heart of it.
“You thought I needed you cleaned up.”
Rex’s jaw flexed. “You’d been in the Senate all day.”
He finally looked at you. Rain had dried in the fine lines near his temple. The split in his lip had darkened where the bacta film pulled at the edge. His eyes looked worn in a way he would murder anyone else for noticing, brown gone heavy beneath the harsh white glow of your entry light.
“And I came off a gunship covered in half a planet,” he said, hand dropping from the helmet to his belt like he needed something to hold and refused to let it be you. “Didn’t think you needed that dragged into your apartment.”
Your breath left through your nose in a hard, humorless sound. Rex’s expression tightened. Not fear. Not exactly. But something close to the dread of a man who had chosen the wrong wire and heard the timer speed up.
“You are unbelievable,” you said, crossing the short distance between you with your wet robe whispering around your ankles. “You are actually unbelievable. I sit in a room full of senators pretending clone casualties are a budget inconvenience, I get one message from Anakin that barely qualifies as basic language, I find out from Jesse that you’ve been planetside for an hour, and your explanation is that you didn’t want to bring dirt into my apartment?”
Rex did not step back when you reached him. His body wanted to. You saw the impulse fire and die in the set of his boots, the tiny shift at his hips, the half-inch lift of his hand before he killed that too. He stayed there and took the full weight of your stare because Rex could take punishment. Rex could stand still under fire. Rex could hold formation while something in him bled out where nobody could see.
But your hand found the edge of his chest plate, and his breath caught.
“You didn’t want me seeing you before you looked steady,” you said, quieter now, which made it worse.
His eyes flicked to your mouth.
Your fingers slid down the center line of his armor, over rain-chilled plastoid and scratches and the dark places where blaster soot had clung in the seams. Rex stood so still you could feel the restraint coming off him like heat, his hands half-curled at his sides, his attention narrowing until the whole apartment seemed to fall away behind him. His helmet sat abandoned on the console. The city moved beyond the windows in thin ribbons of light. Somewhere below, a speeder horn blared and faded.
“You walked past me,” you repeated, and this time the words came softer than anger should have allowed. “Do you have any idea what that looked like?”
Rex swallowed. “No,” he said.
You tapped one finger against the center of his chest plate. “It looked like I got to stand there and watch Captain Rex return to the Republic, return to Skywalker, return to duty, return to every report and roster and supply request waiting to sink its teeth into him, and not return to me.”
His mouth parted and nothing came out. He hated that. You could see it. Rex, who could always find the next order, the next point of cover, the next angle, suddenly trapped with his mouth open because you had said the thing plain enough that he couldn’t shoot around it.
His hand lifted slowly, not quite touching your waist before it stopped. You looked down at it. He dropped it. You raised your eyes back to his face and Rex looked ruined by that tiny failure.
“You’re mad,” he said, uselessly.
“Brilliant work, Captain.”
That snapped something familiar into his face, a flicker of irritated authority surfacing from under the guilt. His shoulders squared. His chin lifted. His voice dropped into that low, stern register that had made entire squads shut up across hangar bays.
“And who do you think you’re talking to like that?” he asked, hand coming up to catch your wrist before you could tap his armor again. For a second, the captain stood in your apartment.
Then you raised one eyebrow and Rex’s grip slackened as if you had cut the power to it. The sternness went first from his eyes, then his mouth, then his shoulders. His thumb stayed on the inside of your wrist, barely touching the pulse there, and he stared at your raised brow like it had reached down into the base of his spine and pulled the obedience out by the root.
“Sorry,” he said, too fast.
You stepped closer until your bodies nearly touched, your robes brushing the front of his thigh plates. “Try that again,” you said.
His eyes dropped, not to the floor this time, but to your hand where it hovered near the fasteners of his chest plate. “I shouldn’t have used that voice on you in here.”
“That’s not what I asked.”
His throat worked. His fingers flexed against his thigh. You waited. Rex exhaled through his nose, and the sound shook at the very edge. “I shouldn’t have walked past you.”
“I should’ve come to you first.”
His brows pulled together, frustration flashing through the desperation now because he was trying, actually trying, and you were not giving him the satisfaction of easy absolution. He looked down at you like he could read the correct sequence from the set of your mouth. Then he stepped forward enough for his chest plate to press against your fingertips.
“I should’ve come to you first because I wanted to,” he said, words rough and low as he took your hand and set it flat over his armor like he could not bear the space anymore but would not let himself grab you without permission. I saw you on the platform, and I wanted to come straight to you so badly I had to make myself look away before my men saw it on my face.”
Rex leaned down a fraction, following the slight pull of your hand like an animal trained to come to pressure, but stopped before his mouth reached yours. His breath brushed your cheek, warm and uneven.
“I’m sorry,” he continued, voice fraying as your other hand slid up to the side of his neck, thumb dragging over the soot there. “I’m sorry I made you stand there and watch me act like you were another thing I could delay until I had time. Tell me what you want me to do to make up for that, and I’ll do it.”
The apology hit deep enough that your anger had to rearrange itself around it. You hated when he got it right, you hated when he got it right while still standing there in armor, mouth split, eyes dark, looking at you like your next word mattered more than orders from High Command.
You unfastened the first latch of his chest plate. Rex inhaled and went still. The latch clicked open.
“You can start,” you said, pulling the chest plate away from him and dropping it onto the console beside his helmet, where it landed with a heavy clatter, “by not touching anything until I tell you.”
Rex’s hands curled into fists at his sides. His eyes lowered to your mouth. “Yes, ma’am.”
The words were steady only because he forced them to be. You heard the scrape under them, the thin crack where need tried to get through. It made heat roll low in your stomach, satisfaction and want and the mean little thrill of watching a man who commanded armies go obedient because you told him to. You stripped the rest of his upper armor slowly enough that he suffered through every piece.
Left pauldron first, unclipped from the harness and set on the console with his chest plate. Rex’s shoulder rolled once when the weight left him, and he stopped the movement halfway, like even relief needed authorization. Then the right shoulder bell, the vambraces, the gloves. His fingers flexed when they came free, bare hands marked with small cuts and dark stains near the nails. You took one wrist and turned his palm up. The skin felt rough and hot under your touch.
Rex watched your thumb move over a split at the base of his thumb. “You’re doing that thing,” he murmured, voice low.
“Counting injuries instead of staying mad.”
You pressed your nail into the tender cut. He sucked in a breath. “I can do both.”
His eyes went darker. You smiled without softness and moved to the black collar of his body-glove, dragging the seal down. The fabric parted over his throat, then his chest, revealing brown skin marked by armor pressure, a fading bruise near his collarbone, and the sharp line of muscle that shifted beneath your fingers as you pushed the garment off his shoulders. He helped without being told, then caught himself and froze with one sleeve halfway down his arm. You looked at him.
Stars. That word, from Rex’s mouth, in that tone—low, immediate, almost ashamed of wanting to be good—made your thighs press together under your robes. You stepped behind him to peel the sleeve down properly.
Rex stared straight ahead at the wall, breathing shallowly through his nose while your hands moved over his shoulders and down his arms. You pressed your mouth to the back of his neck, right above the collar line where sweat and rain had gathered under the armor. His entire body jolted once, barely restrained, and the reaction went straight through you.
“Sensitive?” you asked against his skin.
His voice came rough. “Not usually.”
“Not with anyone else,” Rex corrected, and the words slipped out too quickly, too honestly, before he could armor them in something safer. You paused with your hands at his waist and Rex’s shoulders tightened. He didn’t turn around. Didn’t try to fix it. Just stood there with the back of his neck under your mouth and his hands open at his sides, waiting for you to decide what to do with the thing he had accidentally placed in the room.
You kissed the same spot again. “Take your boots off,” you said.
He moved immediately. The obedience in it nearly made you dizzy. Not hesitant, not cute, not theatrical. Rex bent at the waist and started unsealing his boots while still half out of his upper blacks, body folding with the exhausted stiffness of a man who had spent days in armor and still moved the instant you gave him direction. He set each boot aside parallel to the console, because of course he did, and when he straightened, he looked at you for approval before he seemed to realize he had done it.
You walked around him slowly. Rex tracked you with his eyes but did not move his feet. His bare chest rose and fell under the open body-glove, upper half peeled to his waist, lower armor still fastened over his thighs. His cock had started to harden behind the codpiece already, because you had told him not to touch and made him apologize, because he was apparently very easy when handled correctly. You let your gaze drop there. Rex’s face colored. Not much, but enough for you to easily notice.
His mouth opened, then shut. You waited. He seemed to weigh three possible responses and discard all of them for the truth. “Yes.”
His jaw clenched. You stepped closer and put two fingers under his chin, tilting his face toward yours. “Answer me.”
Rex’s eyes stayed on yours, miserable with want. “From you being mad at me.”
“From you telling me what to do.”
You let your fingers drift down his throat, over the hollow at the base, down the center of his chest. His skin twitched under your touch. “And?”
His breath caught when your hand stopped just above the waistband of his blacks.
“And wanting to fix it,” he said, voice dragging rough at the edges as his hands lifted an inch before he forced them back down. “Wanting you to tell me how. Wanting you to look at me like that until I get it right.” Rex watched your mouth with awful, open hunger.
This time, you kissed him.
He made a sound against you immediately, a low, broken thing that had no place in a barracks or briefing hall. His hands jerked toward your waist, stopped short, and hovered there while his mouth opened under yours. You felt him fighting himself. Felt every trained instinct telling him to take, hold, secure, control, and every private part of him folding under the single rule you had given.
You licked into his mouth, and his hands shook.Tiny, but there. Bare fingers suspended at your hips, close enough to feel the heat of him through the damp layers of your robe. Rex kissed you back like he was trying to be obedient with his mouth alone, tongue eager, lips rough, breath turning harsh when you caught his lower lip between your teeth and pulled. His hips shifted forward.
You stepped back and he followed half a step before catching himself.
“Sorry,” he breathed, and this time it sounded almost helpless.
Maker, you needed to get out of these robes before you did something humiliating like forgive him too early.
You turned away, crossing the sitting room toward the long low table in front of the windows. The apartment opened around you in clean lines and dim evening light, the city throwing blue-white flashes across the floor, the balcony doors sealed against the rain. Your formal sash came loose in your hands. You dropped it onto the table and reached for the pins in your hair, pulling them out one by one. Each jeweled piece clicked against the table’s surface.
Rex stayed in the entryway.
You could feel him watching.
“You can come here,” you said, unfastening the outer layer of your robes without turning around. “Slowly.”
His footsteps started at once. Not quite rushed, the restraint in them had a strained edge, the controlled pace of a man walking through blaster fire because running would get someone killed. He stopped behind you close enough that his heat reached your back but not close enough to touch. You pulled the final pin from your hair, and the loose, carefully arranged style fell around your shoulders, damp from the rain at the ends.
Rex exhaled and you smiled to yourself. You turned your head just enough to look at him over your shoulder. His eyes were on your bare shoulder, and when he dragged them back to your face, the hunger there looked almost painful. Rex’s chest rose hard.
You let the inner robe fall.
The apartment air hit your skin cool through the thin undertunic and breast wrap beneath, both clinging faintly where rain had soaked through the upper layers. You stepped out of the robes pooled around your feet and turned to face him fully. Rex looked like he had forgotten what the war was. Like every campaign map in his head had burned blank except for you standing in the city light with your clothes half on and your expression still sharp enough to cut. His fingers twitched.
“You want to touch me,” you said.
His eyes dropped everywhere at once. Your mouth. Your throat. The fabric stretched over your breasts. The curve of your waist. The place where the undertunic ended at your thighs. He looked ashamed of how fast he looked and too desperate to stop.
“Everywhere,” he said, and the single word came out wrecked enough that you let it pass without demanding length.
You stepped closer and took his hands. Rex’s breath caught like touch from you had become a reward, which, at this point, it had. You placed his palms on your waist over the thin fabric. He gripped you immediately, then loosened as if afraid he had done too much. You put your hands over his and pressed them harder. His eyes shut for one brief second.
You lifted his hands slowly, guiding them up your ribs, over the undertunic, until his thumbs brushed the undersides of your breasts. Rex’s mouth parted. His hands trembled again, only once, then steadied with visible effort. You watched him fight to keep his touch controlled while his eyes darkened and his breathing lost the rhythm he had probably used through the whole campaign.
Rex bent toward the hem of the tunic like he had been waiting for the order, catching the fabric in both hands and drawing it upward. He moved too carefully for how badly he wanted it. The tunic dragged over your skin, up your stomach and ribs, over the breast wrap, then your raised arms. He pulled it free and set it on the table instead of throwing it.
Then, with an expression of real suffering, he grabbed it off the table and dropped it carelessly onto the floor. You almost laughed.
Rex’s shoulders dropped a fraction, relieved by the praise despite himself. Then his attention returned to your chest. The breast wrap was not elaborate. Plain, functional, tied at the side under your arm so you could move through Senate chambers without thinking about it. Rex looked at it like it had personally wronged him. His hands rose, stopped, then curled back to his sides.
You touched the knot. “Help me out here, would you, Captain?”
He stepped in and found the tie with his fingers, his concentration ridiculous for such a simple piece of fabric. He could disassemble a DC-17 blindfolded and half concussed, but the knot at your ribs made him breathe like he was defusing a bomb. When the fabric loosened, he peeled it away layer by layer, and each slow reveal stripped more expression off his face until all that remained was want. Rex stared. You let him.
His hands came up, hovered at your sides, then stopped again. You huffed a laugh, catching his wrists and placing his palms over your breasts. “Rex.”
He groaned like the contact had cracked something in him. His thumbs dragged over your nipples at once, firmer when you inhaled, slower when your back arched. He stepped closer until his bare chest nearly touched you, and bent to press his mouth under your jaw.
“Tell me if I’m doing it right,” he murmured against your throat, words spilling low while his hands shaped your breasts with rough, reverent need, thumbs circling as his mouth moved down the side of your neck. “Don’t make me guess. I’ve been thinking about your voice for six rotations, and I need to hear it when I’m actually touching you.”
Your knees nearly betrayed you. “You’re doing it right,” you said.
Rex’s whole body reacted, a hard breath, a tiny jerk of his hips, a tightening of his hands on your breasts. Praise hit him like a command. You filed that away even though you already knew. His mouth moved lower, kissing along your collarbone, then down to one breast. He paused with his lips just above your nipple, looking up.
“Since when do you ask that politely?”
His eyes flicked to your mouth, then back. “Since I’m trying not to ruin my chances of you letting me keep going.”
You pushed your fingers into his hair and guided his mouth down. Rex latched onto you with a groan, sucking your nipple into the heat of his mouth while one hand kneaded the other breast. His tongue moved firm and slow at first, then faster when your grip tightened in his hair. He liked that. Maker, he liked that too much. His hips pushed forward without permission, cock dragging against the front of his codpiece, and he moaned against your skin like the friction hurt.
He pulled off immediately, wet mouth open, eyes blown wide. “Sorry.”
“What did I say about moving?”
His throat worked. “You didn’t tell me I could.”
You tightened your grip in his hair and tugged his head back. He followed with a broken sound, neck exposed, hands freezing on your body. “You getting careless?” you asked.
“No,” he said fast, then corrected himself when your eyebrow shifted. “Yes. Maybe. I’m trying, but you keep—” He cut himself off, teeth scraping over his lower lip.
His eyes burned into yours.
“You keep touching me,” he said, voice low and frayed, while his hands slid down from your breasts to your waist, stopping there only because he seemed to need something to hold that you had already allowed. “And I don’t have enough left in me tonight to act like I’m not stupid about it.”
Your stomach flipped hard. That was the thing you had been trying to drag out of him. Not polished submission. Rex, exhausted and obsessed and still soldier-shaped, admitting with his hands on you that he was pathetic where you were concerned and hated how much he needed the permission to be exactly that. You kissed him again, and this time it was not controlled.
Rex came alive under your mouth with a desperation that made the table scrape back when you shoved him into it. His lower armor hit the edge with a dull plastoid knock, and his hands clamped on your waist before he remembered himself. You didn’t correct him. Not yet. You pushed your tongue into his mouth and swallowed the rough moan that broke from him, dragging your nails down his chest until he bucked against nothing and cursed into the kiss.
The table behind him was low enough that when you pushed, he sat. Rex dropped onto it heavily, legs spreading, thigh armor forcing his knees wider. The table creaked but held. Your apartment had expensive furniture. It could survive a little disrespect. You stood between his knees and reached for his lower armor.
Rex’s hands went to the table behind him, gripping the edge because he had learned. His breathing turned harsh as you unfastened one thigh plate, then the other, stacking them nowhere, simply letting each piece fall to the rug with muffled thuds. He flinched every time you mishandled the armor and said nothing. The effort looked like torture.
“You’re learning,” you murmured.
His eyes stayed on your hands. “Trying.”
“Because you want to be good?”
That was so honest it almost sounded ugly. You paused with one hand on his knee plate. Rex looked up, and whatever he found on your face made him shift forward, forgetting the rule again. His hand caught your hip, not pulling, but holding like the idea of space had become intolerable. Your hand settled over his.
“I didn’t tell you to touch me.”
Rex’s grip tightened once before he forced himself to release, his hand returned to the table. “I’m sorry,” he breathed.
You finished stripping the lower armor off him. When the codpiece came away, the shape of his cock beneath the black body-glove made your mouth go dry. He was fully hard now, thick and straining against the fabric, dark dampness gathered at the tip where he had leaked through. You looked at it. Then at him.
Rex looked embarrassed. Not ashamed exactly. Embarrassed by how obvious it was. How little control remained.
“You’re making a mess,” you said.
“From me taking your armor off?”
His eyes flicked down, then back up. “From you making me sit still while you do it.”
“You like being made to sit still.”
“I like being made to listen to you.”
The words came faster now. Less filtered. Each one made your pulse beat harder. You stepped close enough for your bare thigh to brush his inner knee. Rex’s hands spasmed on the table edge. “Take yourself out,” you said softly. He obeyed so quickly it bordered on obscene.
His fingers went to the seal at his waist, dragging it down with an unsteady pull, then shoving the lower half of the body-glove down just far enough to free his cock. He groaned when the air hit him, head dipping forward, one hand wrapping around himself without stroking because you had not told him he could. The sight of his fist around his cock, knuckles tight, tip flushed and wet, made heat spill through you so fast your own composure faltered.
His eyes latched onto the tiny change in your breathing, and some part of him almost smiled. You stepped between his spread legs, took his wrist, and pulled his hand away from his cock, wrapping your fingers around him instead. Rex’s head fell back, throat working around a sound he barely managed to swallow. His cock jumped in your palm, hot and heavy, already slick at the tip. You stroked once, slowly, just to watch his shoulders tense.
His eyes opened, immediately panicked in the most controlled Rex way possible. “What?”
You stroked him again and his hands slammed flat on the table behind him. “Don’t come,” you repeated.
Rex’s breathing fractured. “You can’t—stars, you can’t put your hand on me like that and say it like it’s easy.”
“Did I ask if it was easy?”
“No, ma’am,” he got out, voice breaking around the honorific as your thumb dragged under the head of his cock. You worked him slow, then slower, watching his face fight itself. Rex’s mouth opened around shallow breaths. Sweat gathered at his hairline, mingling with rain and the leftover grime he had tried to hide from you. His hips twitched up once, and you immediately stopped.
“Don’t,” he pleaded, and the word was out before he could dress it up.
You tilted your head. “Don’t what?”
His eyes focused on you with visible effort, pupils blown. “Don’t stop touching me.”
“I’ll be still,” he said, too fast, hands gripping the table edge so hard the tendons in his forearms stood out. “I’ll be still, I swear. Please. I’ve been thinking about you since before the gunship landed, and I can’t—fuck, I can, I can, just please, baby.”
The next few strokes dragged him apart in layers. His hips stayed down, but only because he locked his entire body to make it happen. You could see every attempt to stay good. The white-knuckle grip on the table, the muscles in his abdomen jumping when your hand twisted near the head, the way he kept his eyes on you even when they went unfocused. His mouth formed your name once, barely audible, and then he swallowed the rest like it had nearly exposed too much.
You leaned in and kissed the side of his throat. His cock throbbed hard in your grip. “Don’t come,” you murmured against his skin.
He gave a rough, helpless laugh that sounded almost like pain. “You’re cruel.”
His laugh collapsed into a groan. “Fair.”
You stroked him faster. Rex’s head tipped forward until his forehead nearly met yours. He didn’t kiss you. Didn’t dare without permission. His breath struck your lips in harsh, uneven bursts, and his eyes stayed on yours with such desperate focus that it made your chest tighten. ‘
Your hand slowed. “Tell you what?”
“What you want,” he said, voice low and stripped raw while one hand left the table, hovered uselessly near your waist, then returned before you could correct him. “Tell me what fixes it. Tell me where to put my hands. Tell me if you want my mouth, or my cock, or if you want me on the floor until you’re done.”
You pulled your hand from his cock, this time, he didn’t ask you not to. Instead he looked at you through half-shut eyes, chest heaving.
Rex was on his knees before the second breath passed. Too fast for pride. One knee hit the rug, then the other, and the table behind him shifted from the sudden absence of his weight. He looked up at you, chest heaving, body-glove shoved low around his hips, cock flushed and leaking against his stomach, hands planted on his thighs like he did not trust himself to lift them.
Your apartment lights caught on the gold thread in the rug beneath him. Rex looked at you like the order had knocked every useful thought out of his skull and left only devotion in its place. His gaze dropped between your thighs. You had not taken off the last thin layer under your robes yet. Barely anything, really, a soft undergarment already damp from arousal. Rex stared at the wet spot like it might end the war.
“Take them off,” you said.
His hands moved to your hips, and you almost groaned. “Good,” you said, because he deserved it.
Rex’s mouth parted at the praise, and his hands settled at your hips and hooked under the fabric. He dragged it down your thighs carefully, too carefully, as though the restraint had become part of the worship. His fingers grazed your skin on the way, calluses catching at your hips, your thighs, behind your knees. He leaned forward as he pulled the fabric past your calves, and his mouth brushed your inner thigh. Not a kiss; an accident, maybe. Like he couldn’t help but follow the draw of your body. Your hand slid into his hair.
He froze with the fabric around one ankle.
His eyes lifted at once, mouth parted, hands still caught around the last bit of cloth like he had forgotten there was anything in the room except you.
You pressed his head back a fraction with your grip, not enough to hurt, just enough to make him follow the pressure. “Don’t get lost.”
A flush climbed his neck, and Maker, you loved him stupid like this. “Yes ma’am.”
He freed the garment and dropped it somewhere beside his knee without checking where it landed. Then his hands returned to your calves, sliding up slowly, waiting for you to stop him. You didn’t. He rose higher on his knees and leaned in, nose brushing the inside of your thigh, breathing you in with a low, shaky exhale that made your stomach clench.
“Don’t make me wait,” he murmured, mouth grazing your skin as his hands slid around to the backs of your thighs. “Please. I’ll do it right. I’ll keep my hands where you want them, I’ll stay down, just don’t stand there and make me look at your pussy when I’m this close.”
Your grip tightened in his hair, “Open your mouth.”
He obeyed instantly, allowing your hand on the back of his head to guide him forward into your folds. The first stroke of his tongue against your cunt made your knees bend. Rex’s hands clamped around your thighs at once, holding you up before you could think about it. His mouth moved hot and broad, licking from your entrance to your clit with a pressure that dragged a sharp sound out of you. He groaned like the sound rewarded him and did it again, slower, pressing his face deeper until his nose brushed your clit and his tongue pushed at your entrance.
“Fuck,” you breathed, one hand bracing on his shoulder.
Rex looked up at you from between your thighs, and the sight nearly undid you. His eyes were wet with heat, unfocused and pleading while his mouth stayed on you. Not smug or composed. Hunger would be a better word for it, or maybe grateful. Like being allowed there had become the only thing he knew how to do with the fear of almost not coming back.
He licked into you again, and your fingers tightened in his hair, dragging him closer. Rex moaned loud enough that you glanced toward the door. He did not seem to care. Or, more likely, he cared but could not make himself care enough to break the contact with you.
His lips closed around your clit, sucking with a focused desperation that made your hips buck into his mouth. The movement shoved his head back against your hand. Rex groaned again and gripped your ass, pulling you into him as if he wanted you to smother the last disciplined thought out of him.
He pulled back barely an inch, lips slick, breath hot against your cunt.
“Use me,” he said, words ragged as he shifted one of your legs higher over his shoulder, both hands gripping your hips to steady you while his cock jerked untouched against his stomach. “I mean it. Put me where you want me, make me fix it with my tongue if that’s what you need,” His voice broke on the last word, a whine slipping through, “I can’t think when you’re above me like this and I don’t want to.”
You couldn’t do much more than draw him back towards your cunt once more with a soft noise. His mouth sealed over you harder, tongue working fast through your folds before focusing back on your clit, sucking and licking with such frantic devotion that your balance failed and he had to pin you between his shoulders and the table edge behind you. One of his hands spread over your lower back, pulling you closer. The other gripped your ass, fingers digging in, not controlling you so much as holding on for dear life.
He was hard. So hard you could feel the occasional jerk of his hips against your shin where his cock brushed you. He ground forward once, chasing friction and then jerking back before you could reprimand him for the movement, and whimpered into your cunt when it wasn’t enough. When you looked down, he was staring up at you, mouth working, eyes pleading for approval.
“You’re pretty like this,” you said.
His tongue faltered for half a second, then returned with renewed desperation, like praise had shoved him deeper into want. The hand on your ass squeezed and his hips jerked again. He looked almost angry with himself for liking it so much, which only made it better.
“So pretty on your knees,” you continued, voice rougher now because the pressure was building fast, your hand dragging through his short hair and holding him where you needed. “Are you sure you’re a captain?”
Rex moaned again, low and broken, and sucked your clit harder. Pleasure coiled hard and hot at the base of your spine. You tightened your thigh around his shoulder. “Don’t stop.”
He made a muffled sound that might have been a promise if his mouth hadn’t been occupied, and then two fingers pressed at your entrance. He paused there, looking up for the tiny nod you gave him before pushing them inside.
The stretch of his fingers combined with his mouth made the room flash at the edges. He curled them immediately, not tentative, not guessing. Rex knew your body because he paid attention like it was another battlefield map, except now he looked ruined by the privilege of being accurate. His fingers dragged against the spot that made your breath catch, again and again, while his lips and tongue worked your clit through every little jerk of your hips.
“Rex,” you said, voice cracking, your hips rocking down into him as you felt yourself nearing the edge.
He pulled back only enough to speak against you, fingers still moving, mouth brushing wet over your clit with each word. “Come for me,” he rasped, and then, before you could punish the command, his gaze flicked up and he corrected himself with desperate speed. “Please, come for me, I need it. I need to know I’m making it right.”
You came so hard your hand slammed onto the table behind you.
Rex’s mouth returned to you instantly, groaning through the first pulse of your cunt around his fingers. Your hips rocked into his face without rhythm, chasing and fleeing the pressure all at once. He held you up through the whole thing, hand broad at your back, thigh trapped over his shoulder, his fingers moving slower when the pleasure turned sharp but not withdrawing until your grip in his hair loosened and you pushed lightly at his forehead, and he withdrew immediately. Lowering your leg carefully from his shoulder and kept both hands on your hips until he knew you could stand. Then he looked up at you from the floor, mouth wet, chin shining, eyes blown wide and dazed.
You touched his cheek and he leaned into your palm before he could stop himself. “Oh, Rex,” you murmured.
His eyes shut for half a second.
When they opened, they looked almost embarrassed. “You still mad?” he asked, voice hoarse.
You slid your thumb over his lower lip, spreading the wetness there. “Get on the table.”
Rex stood too fast and nearly knocked the low table behind him with his calf. He caught it, steadied it, then froze because he had touched furniture without being told while naked, hard, and wrecked in your sitting room. The look he gave you was so sheepish and desperate that you had to press your lips together.
He sat on the edge, then shifted back when you gestured for him to move farther onto it. The table was wide, low, sturdier than it looked, and soon Rex was sitting with his knees spread, body-glove shoved around his thighs, armor scattered across your rug, hands planted on the surface at either side of him. He looked absurdly large on it, muscles tense, chest bare, cock hard against his abdomen and slick with his own arousal.
You climbed onto his lap. Rex’s hands lifted toward you, then stopped. You settled your knees on either side of his hips and looked down at him. His breath came in short pulls. “Can I touch you?”
His eyes moved over you with helpless want. “Anywhere.”
You reached down and took his wrists, placing his hands on your waist. He gripped you like salvation. You lifted your hips and guided his cock to your entrance. Rex’s eyes dropped between your bodies. His mouth opened. He did not move, but everything in him strained toward it. You pressed the head of his cock against your pussy and held it there. Rex’s fingers dug into your waist.
“Please,” he said immediately, the word dragged raw from him.
You paused. He looked up at you, eyes almost wild. “I’ll stay still, I’ll be good, just—please don’t stop there. You can’t not—stars, I'm not moving; I promise I won’t. Just please.”
You took mercy on him and sank down an inch. Rex’s head fell back with a rough groan. The stretch burned deliciously, your body still sensitive from his mouth, cunt opening around him slowly. You kept one hand around the base of his cock to guide him, the other braced on his shoulder. He was thick, hot, pulsing inside you already like he might come from the first few inches if you let him. You stopped there just to watch him suffer. His hands shook at your waist.
“You’re not even halfway in,” you said.
His laugh sounded wrecked. “No,” He said, the word rushing out before he even got a chance to think about it.
His eyes flew open. “I will. I’ll last. Just keep going, please; I’ll do whatever you want.”
You sank another inch and Rex’s hips jerked up involuntarily, a small sound escaping him. You stopped immediately, a heat in your eyes that you usually never directed at him. He cursed, sharp and furious at himself. “Sorry. Sorry, I didn’t mean—”
You lifted yourself nearly off him.
“No,” he gasped, hands clamping at your waist before he remembered and forced them open, palms hovering uselessly. “No, don’t—please, I’m sorry, I swear I’ll be good. I just felt you and I—fuck, please, baby, don’t take it away.”
You stared at him. Rex looked up at you, breathing hard, mouth swollen, eyes wet at the edges from sheer restraint. Pathetic and wanton, and still undeniably Rex. You lowered back down to the same point and he went rigid beneath you.
“Good,” you said. Rex shuddered so hard you felt it inside you. You took him deeper slowly, inch by inch, until the stretch became full, then fuller, then almost too much. Rex’s hands settled back on your waist with your nod, and his fingers curled there, gripping you but not pushing. He kept his hips pinned to the table, abdomen trembling with the effort. When you finally sank down completely, taking him to the base, both of you went still. He filled you so deeply your breath came out as a shaky little sound you would have mocked from anyone else. Rex heard it and looked ruined.
“You feel so good,” he whispered, voice rough and low while his hands slid just a little higher on your waist, thumbs pressing under your ribs like he needed to feel you breathe around him. “You feel so fucking good. Please, cyare, please-.”
You kissed him and started to move before he could continue babbling. The first lift nearly ruined both of you. Your cunt dragged up the length of him, slick and tight, until only the head stretched your entrance, then you sank back down. Rex moaned into your mouth, not controlled, not quiet enough, hands gripping your waist like he could anchor himself through you. You did it again slower. His breathing turned ragged, mouth slipping from yours to press against your jaw because he could not keep kissing and stay still at the same time.
You found a rhythm with your knees braced against the table, one hand on his shoulder, the other in his hair. Up. Down. Slow enough to make him feel every drag. Deep enough to make your own thighs tremble. Rex sat under you and took it, chest heaving, hands sliding from your waist to your hips only after you nodded again. He helped only by holding, not lifting, not guiding, his restraint fraying thread by thread.
“You’re gonna ruin me,” he rasped, voice catching hard as you lifted and sank back down, his fingers digging into your hips the second your cunt tightened around him. “Fuck, I thought—stars, I didn’t want to come to you like this, not—” His breath broke when you rolled your hips again, his hands dragging uselessly at your waist like he couldn’t decide whether to hold you still or pull you down harder. “I can’t—just keep going. Please.”
Your pace faltered at the crack in his voice. Rex looked at you like he felt the effect and might die from it. The table shifted under you with a low scrape. Rex’s hands tightened, then loosened when he remembered. His mouth dropped to your chest, catching one nipple between his lips as you moved. He sucked clumsily at first, too distracted by the wet heat of you sliding over him, then firmer when your hand tightened in his hair. The added stimulation sent pleasure curling through you, building again despite the soreness.
He lifted his mouth just enough to speak against your breast, each word hot and rough while his tongue flicked over your nipple between phrases. “Tell me I’m doing it right,” he murmured, almost pleading, hands sliding over your ass now because you hadn’t stopped him and he was too desperate not to take the permission. “Tell me I’m good for you when I sit here and let you use me, because I can feel you getting close and I need to hear it, I need—fuck, I need you to say it.”
His words made your cunt clench tightly around him. “You’re good,” you said, and the words came out almost as wrecked as he looked. “You’re so good when you listen.”
Rex bucked up once before he could stop it. Your hand on his head gripped tighter, a loq sound escaping you. He froze, panting. “Sorry.”
You leaned close to his ear. “Again.”
Rex made a sound that turned your entire body hot, and he thrust up into you. Not taking over. Yet. One sharp upward drive that met your downward movement and made you cry out. He did it again only when your hand in his hair tugged approval into his scalp. The rhythm shifted, still yours, but now his hips met you each time you dropped, driving his cock deeper, harder, the sound of skin and wetness filling the apartment beneath the city’s distant hum.
His hands moved over you like he couldn’t get enough surface under his palms. Waist. Ass. Spine. Thighs. Back to your hips. He pulled you down when you wanted him to, stopped when your grip changed, learned every silent correction with humiliating speed. Rex had always learned fast. It was one of the things that made him dangerous. Now it made him devastating.
“Please let me see you,” he said, voice breaking as his hips worked up into you, his forehead nearly against yours, eyes fixed on your face like you were the only point of command left in the room. “I know I don’t deserve it yet, but I’m trying to be good. Tell me I’m making you feel good.”
Your orgasm started building low and sharp again, fed by the words, the angle, the thick slide of his cock, the utter need in his face. You reached between you and found your clit, but Rex caught your wrist gently, his thumb replaced your fingers at once.
“Let me,” he breathed, circling hard and precise while his other hand gripped your ass to help you ride him through the sudden shock of pleasure. “Let me make you come again.”
The pressure coiled hot and bright, your body tightening around him with every thrust. Rex’s eyes dropped once to where his cock disappeared into you, then jerked back up to your face because he remembered. The obedience in that tiny correction pushed you closer than it should have.
“You’re such a good boy for me," you whispered, adoration evident in your voice, one of your hands moving to cradle his cheek as you choked back a whimper, his cock hitting just right deep within you.
The words nearly broke him. His hips stuttered, breath choking, thumb faltering on your clit for half a second before he forced it back into rhythm. His eyes went wide and desperate, hands tightening like he needed to hold onto the table, onto you, onto himself.
“Fuck, baby,” he practically begged, the words spilling out against your mouth as he thrust up into you with less precision now, need chewing through the last of his control. “Please. I’ll do anything, just—stars, call me that again when you come.”
Your orgasm hit before you could answer. It rolled through you hard, cunt clamping around him in pulsing waves as your body folded toward his. Rex caught you, arm locked around your back, thumb still rubbing your clit until you jerked and shoved weakly at his wrist. He stopped immediately, but his hips kept moving, short and desperate, cock dragging through the tight aftershocks of your orgasm while his face pressed into your throat.
“So fuckin’ good for me,” you gasped, barely able to get the words out.
Rex made a broken, helpless sound and came. His hips drove up hard, burying himself deep as his cock pulsed inside you, spilling hot while his hands gripped you with shaking force. He didn’t go silent. He couldn’t. Your name came out against your skin, wrecked and low, followed by a string of curses and half-formed apologies that dissolved into breath. His whole body trembled under you, not from weakness, not exactly, but from the violence of holding back until permission and then finally letting go.
You held his head against your chest while he finished. Outside, the city kept moving. Inside, your apartment held the aftermath in soft, obscene detail: armor scattered across the rug, wet robes on the floor, Rex’s helmet turned toward the wall, rain ticking faintly against the balcony glass, his cock still buried inside you while both of you breathed like you had outrun something.
Rex’s hands loosened first, one finger at a time. Then his arms wrapped around you properly, not grabbing now, desperate still, but not in the same way. He held you with his face pressed to your chest, mouth brushing the skin above your heart. You felt him swallow. Felt him breathe you in like he had been denying himself that too.
You stroked the back of his head and he went heavy against you. Not fully, but enough to let the weight of him settle for two breaths. “Still mad?” he murmured, voice ruined.
You looked down at the top of his head, at the blond hair mussed from your hands, at the sweat still on his skin. “Yes.”
“Okay,” he said, and the word came quiet against your chest while one hand slid up your back in a slow, grounding path. “I can work with that.”
You huffed a laugh despite yourself. Rex lifted his head immediately, eyes searching your face like the sound mattered. His mouth was swollen, his lip had opened again, and his brow sealant was barely holding. He looked tired and filthy and satisfied in the most embarrassing, gorgeous way, and you wanted to be madder than you were. You were still mad. Just less sharp at the edges.
“You’re bleeding again,” you said, before something more vulnerable could take it’s place.
His eyes flicked toward the refresher hall. “You want me to get the medkit?”
“No. I want you to sit there and not touch anything important.”
His mouth twitched. “Yes, ma’am.”
You shifted absentmindedly and were immediately made aware once again that you were still seated with Rex inside. You eased off his cock slowly, both of you hissing at the sensitivity. His hands came to your hips to help, carefully helping you to stand up gently without making a production of it. The mess between your thighs made heat crawl up your neck despite everything that had happened. Rex saw that too, and the look on his face nearly got him in trouble all over again.
“Don’t look proud,” you said, stepping onto the rug with unsteady legs.
“You’re a terrible liar.”
“I’m not lying,” he said, shifting to sit at the edge of the table with his body-glove still shoved around his thighs, one hand reaching toward you and stopping when you looked down at it. He curled his fingers back with visible effort. “I’m trying not to look like I want to put my mouth on you again.”
Your thighs clenched, a deep breath escaping you as you flicked you gaze away before you could do something stupid like push him back down onto the table. You pointed toward the refresher. “Medkit.”
He stood too quickly, his body reminding him halfway up that he had injuries and had just been thoroughly used on your low table. His balance hitched, and you caught his arm before he could hide it. Neither of you said anything.
Rex pressed his fingers once over yours on his arm, then released and moved toward the refresher with the stiff, naked dignity of a man who had survived an emotional ambush. He came back with the medkit in one hand and a damp cloth in the other, eyes flicking to your thighs before he carefully looked at your face. He held out the cloth, jaw shifting. “Can I?”
You sat on the edge of the table and let him kneel again. Rex moved slower this time, settling between your legs with the cloth warm in his hand, gaze fixed on his work. No teasing. No grin. No attempt to make sex into something lighter than it had been. He cleaned you with the same serious attention he gave field dressings, one hand steady at your ankle, the other gentle between your thighs. When you twitched from sensitivity, his thumb stroked once over your calf.
“'m sorry," he said quietly.
You hummed and tapped his forehead with two fingers. He accepted that for what it was with a twitch of his lips. When he finished cleaning you up, you took the cloth from him and tossed it toward the laundry chute. It landed short. Rex looked at it like he wanted to pick it up before it became an issue, but your eyes on him stopped him short. You opened the medkit and crooked your finger. “Come here.”
He rose to sit beside you on the table. The furniture gave another worrying creak. You cleaned the split at his lip first and Rex sat through it with his eyes on your shoulder, hands resting on his thighs. When the antiseptic touched the cut, his fingers tightened once.
“Don’t be dramatic about some bacta,” you muttered, dabbing carefully. “It’s embarrassing.”
“And yet here you are, making a face.”
“You can’t even see your face.”
He stared at you and you stared back. For a beat, everything was still. Then. his mouth twitched and ruined the whole effort. You sealed his lip, then worked on his brow, smoothing the new bacta strip over the place where the old one had pulled loose. Rex closed his eyes while you pressed the edges down. You let your thumb linger at his temple, wiping away the last bit of sweat there.
“You come to me first next time,” you said.
His eyes opened, no hesitation in them this time. “I come to you first.”
“Not after you clean up.”
“Not after you decide you look steady enough.”
His hand rose and settled at your knee, warm and careful. “No.”
You searched his face slowly, and Rex sat there letting you, which somehow did more damage than any begging could have. He looked tired now in a way even he could not file down into something useful. You pressed the edge of the bacta strip down over his brow with your thumb, slower than necessary, and Rex held still under your touch with his hands planted on his thighs as if he had been ordered there. The fact that he hadn’t moved to fix anything, hadn’t reached for the vambrace half-under the table or the codpiece lying upside down near your discarded robe, told you more than another apology would have.
“You’re staring at the pauldron,” you said, smoothing the last corner of the patch until it sealed properly.
Rex’s eyes flicked back to your face, guilty and annoyed with himself for being caught. “It’s going to scratch the floor if it stays under the table like that.”
You looked down at the blue-painted curve of plastoid wedged beneath the edge of the rug, then back at him. “Tragic.”
His mouth shifted like he wanted to argue and remembered halfway through that arguing had gone badly for him all night. “Your floor is expensive.”
“So is the vase Fives knocked over last month, and somehow the Republic survived.”
“That vase was ugly,” Rex muttered, low enough that he clearly hadn’t meant to offer it as a full contribution.
You paused with the medkit still open beside your thigh, then gave him a look. Rex’s shoulders went still. The slight heat that crawled up his neck made the whole mess of him more satisfying than the line deserved. “Sorry,” he added, not because he sounded particularly sorry about the vase, but because the correction came out of him now like instinct.
You closed the medkit and set it aside. “You’re not going back yet.”
His head lifted, a flicker of uncertainty flashing on his face before he schooled his expression. There it was. The duty. The reflex. The shape of every report, roster, casualty list, and brother waiting for him at the edge of his expression before he could stop it. Rex did not even get the words out; his mouth only parted around them, but you saw the whole argument forming anyway. The Resolute had returned from a campaign, and men would look for their captain the way ships looked for nav beacons in bad weather.
You knew all of that, and he knew you knew. That was why, after a beat, Rex closed his mouth. You leaned back on one hand and let your bare knee bump his armored thigh. “Comm Jesse.”
Rex’s brows drew together. “For what?”
“To tell him you’re unavailable for the rest of the night.”
His expression sharpened, not quite protest, more like disbelief that had run into a wall. “The rest of the night?”
His hand flexed on his thigh. “He’ll ask why.”
“Then use your captain voice and make him regret the curiosity.”
That dragged a breath from him that nearly became a laugh, except he swallowed it before it could soften the moment too much. Rex looked toward his helmet on the console, then at the comm clipped to his belt where his lower body-glove had been shoved back into something passable. He didn’t reach for it right away. His eyes returned to you, and the hunger there had changed since the table. Still needy, but now it had something steadier under it. A want that had less to do with sex and more to do with being made to stay where he had almost failed to come first. He reached for the comm.
“Jesse,” Rex said, and his voice came back clean enough that your stomach tightened on reflex, even with his hair mussed and his chest still bare. His eyes stayed on you while he spoke, which made the effect worse. “Take first pass on the return summary and send equipment losses to Appo. Anything medical goes through Kix before it hits my desk. If General Skywalker asks, tell him I’m delayed.”
A burst of static answered first, then Jesse’s voice came through, suspiciously awake. “Delayed where?”
Rex’s jaw shifted. His eyes did not leave yours. “That wasn’t an invitation to ask a follow-up.”
A pause. Jesse coughed once, poorly covering what might have been laughter. “Copy that, Captain. First pass to Appo, med notes through Kix, and if Skywalker asks, you’re delayed in a classified location with no follow-ups.”
“Jesse,” Rex warned, hearing his solder’s grin in the words.
Jesse, for all his worth, got control of his amusement before responding with a clipped, “understood, sir.”
The channel clicked dead before Rex could destroy all his remaining dignity. Rex lowered his hand slowly. The tips of his ears had gone red. You looked at them with open satisfaction, and he caught you doing it. “Don’t,” he said, though there was no weight behind it.
You took the comm from his hand and set it beside the medkit. “That was good.”
Rex’s throat moved around the praise. His eyes dropped, not away in shame this time, but down to your mouth, your shoulder, the line of your body. He looked like the words had reached under his armor more effectively than your hands had. “Yeah?”
You slid off the table carefully, still sore enough that your legs reminded you of what he had done every time your feet settled into the rug. Rex moved instantly, one hand coming toward your waist before he stopped himself so hard his fingers curled in midair. You let him suffer for exactly one breath before you caught his wrist and placed his hand on your hip. You couldn’t help but huff a small laugh, “Still trying to be good?”
His palm spread over your skin with immediate, almost painful relief. “I can keep doing that.”
“I know,” You said before you could really think over your answer, something deeper than trust running true in the words.
You could feel the tiredness in your own body now. The fight had gone out of you all at once, not because you weren’t still irritated, but because the apartment felt warm now, and Rex was here, and your body had apparently decided that if it was going to stop bracing for disaster, it was going to do it all at once. So instead of saying something sharp, you slid off the table.
Rex moved immediately. His hand came out toward your waist on instinct, stopping only when he realized you had already caught your balance. The aborted gesture pulled at something in your chest. He still looked like a man waiting for instruction. You bent to grab the blanket tossed over the back of the couch, thick and soft and still warm in the center from where you had left it there earlier in the evening, before any of this had started. The fabric dragged over your arms as you shook it out. Then you crossed the sitting room without looking back, already knowing he would follow.
The couch sat in front of the long windows, low and deep, positioned so the whole skyline spilled out beyond it in wet blue-white smears. Coruscant looked blurred tonight, towers softened by rain, traffic lanes streaked with light, everything farther away than usual. You lowered yourself into the corner of the couch with a tired exhale, pulling the blanket up around your shoulders and then around your legs, tucking it close until the warmth settled against your skin. The shift made every ache in your body speak up at once. Your thighs, your hips, the sore drag low in your stomach, the tension left in your shoulders from hours spent carrying too much anger upright. You let yourself feel all of it now because there was finally room to.
Rex stayed standing for a second too long. You didn’t have to look to know what he was doing. He would be watching the couch first, then the blanket, then you, then probably the armor on the floor again because leaving it there clearly offended something in him on a spiritual level. He would be deciding whether you wanted space, whether he had earned it, whether touching you now would soothe anything or ruin it. He would be overthinking every inch of it while pretending he wasn’t.
You turned your head and looked at him. He stood a few steps away in the dim apartment light, chest bare, lower half still only half-sorted, exhaustion written everywhere now that he had stopped pretending he could outrun it. His eyes lifted to yours, cautious and hungry both, and something about the way he stood there—big and dangerous and quietly wrecked, waiting instead of taking—made the last of your irritation loosen around the edges.
Rex didn’t waste time asking where. He came to the side of the couch, one knee sinking briefly into the cushion as he leaned in, and the look he gave you up close had none of the clean composure he wore for everyone else. It had too much in it. Too much want, too much relief, too much shame over the wanting, too much need to be close without making a scene out of it. He put one hand on the edge of the cushion, stopping there as though waiting for you to change your mind.You lifted the blanket. That was all it took.
Rex climbed onto the couch behind you, the cushions shifted under his weight, dipping deeper on one side, and then his body heat reached you in a rush as he settled in close. He didn’t drape himself over you all at once. He moved in increments, slow enough for you to feel each choice separately: one knee bracketing the backs of your legs, one arm coming around your waist under the blanket, his chest fitting to your back, his other hand finding the edge of the throw and pulling it higher over both of you. By the time he finished, you were tucked fully into the curve of him, cocooned in blanket and body heat and the very specific smell of Rex. His face settled against the side of your neck, breathing there like he needed the proof of you under his mouth.
It did something violent and quiet to you, how natural it felt. You let your head tip back until it rested lightly against his shoulder. The blanket bunched under your chin. Rex’s arm tightened around your middle, his hand splaying warm and heavy over your stomach, and the other slipped under the blanket to find your thigh and hold there. Not wandering. Not asking for more. Just grounding himself with both hands as if he had spent too many hours without knowing whether he would get to.
For a little while neither of you said anything.
That silence didn’t feel empty. It felt full in the way your apartment only ever did when someone you wanted in it had stopped trying to be impressive. You could hear the rain better from the couch, a soft hiss against the glass that blurred together with the vents and the distant thrum of traffic beyond the window. Rex breathed against your neck, slower now, though not asleep and nowhere near it. Every now and then his thumb moved against your stomach in a small pass that told you he was still awake, still thinking, still trying not to think too hard. You let your own hand drift back under the blanket until you found his wrist and held it there.
He responded by tightening his hold again.
That would have been enough for you, honestly. The warmth, the weight, the stupid relief of him wrapped around you instead of halfway across the city trying to clean himself into something more acceptable. Still, the thing from earlier remained where it had lodged under your ribs, and with Rex held close like this, with no armor between you and no room for him to dodge sideways, it seemed meaner to leave it alone than to say it.
“You do that again,” you said quietly, staring out at the blurred lights beyond the glass, “I’m dragging you here in front of everyone.”
Rex’s breath shifted against your neck. Not quite a laugh. More like he had one and chose not to use it. “I know,” he murmured.
You turned your head a little so you could hear him better. “I mean it.”
His hand spread flatter over your stomach, thumb pressing once as if he was anchoring himself before he answered. “I know you mean it.” His voice had gone quieter in this position, rough and low where it touched your skin. “That’s why I’m listening.”
The answer settled deep. You stared at the window and watched rain gather and slip down the glass in uneven lines. “I know I can’t always be your top priority, but I really wish you’d commed.”
Rex went still behind you.
Not dramatically. Not in a way anyone else would have noticed. You noticed because you were wrapped in him. Because you could feel the exact moment his breathing stalled and the exact moment he let it go again. His forehead pressed a fraction more firmly against the side of your neck.
“I know that too,” he said after a moment, and the words came stripped of anything clever or careful. That hit harder than some long explanation would have. It sounded like Rex. Blunt, dissatisfied, unwilling to dress it up. You closed your eyes. His arm around you held steady, unyielding in a way that felt less like restraint and more like a promise he didn’t have better words for.
“And if you come back half dead and think I’d rather hear about it from Jesse than from you—”
“I won’t.” This time he interrupted, quiet but immediate, like he could not stand to let that sentence reach its end. His mouth brushed the skin below your ear when he spoke again, slower now, forced out with the kind of honesty he only ever gave you when he was too tired to build walls quickly enough. “I just wanted to come to you without looking like I needed you as much as I did.”
The confession landed low and hot and sad in equal measure. It made something inside you soften so quickly it almost hurt. You turned under the blanket as much as the couch would allow, just enough to get one arm free and lay your hand over the forearm still wrapped around your waist. His skin was warm. The fine hair there caught faintly against your palm.
You frowned slightly, eyes moving across Rex’s chest and then up to try and meet his gaze. “But you did need me,” the words came out more as a question than anything else.
His eyes lifted to yours over your shoulder, closer now than you’d realized. Tired, dark, utterly open in a way he would deny in the morning if pressed. “Yes.”
You pulled gently at his arm until he understood and shifted with you, giving you enough room to turn farther into him. The blanket tangled around your legs and his, but neither of you cared. When you faced him properly, Rex’s hand slid from your stomach to your back, broad palm settling between your shoulder blades under the blanket. Up close like this, he looked even more spent. The new strip over his brow sat slightly crooked on one side and his mouth looked a little bruised from you. You touched him anyway, your thumb tracing the shape of the sealed split. Rex watched your face the whole time.
You let your hand slide from his mouth to the side of his neck, then into the short hair at the nape, where it was still faintly damp from the rain. “Are you alright with staying?”
The words changed something in him instantly. You saw it, felt it, in the way his whole body seemed to give a fraction, tension loosening where he had been holding himself up by sheer force of habit. His forehead dipped until it rested against yours. His eyes shut. The hand at your back spread wider.
“I can do that,” he murmured.
That pulled a tiny breath from him that might have been relief. He shifted again, nudging you deeper into the couch until your back found the cushions and he could curl over you more fully without crushing you. One of your legs ended up tucked between his, blanket caught everywhere, his knee pressed against the backs of yours, his hand broad on your waist now instead of your back. He buried his face in the space between your neck and shoulder and stayed there, breathing slow and warm against your skin. You could feel the exhaustion coming down on him in layers.
He wasn’t asleep, but the fight of staying upright had gone. His body kept settling around yours in little unconscious adjustments, each one bringing him closer, as if even now some part of him didn’t trust distance and kept correcting it. You let him. You let your fingers trail through the short hair at the back of his head. You let your other hand rest under the blanket over his side, feeling the steady expansion of his breath against your palm. The couch wasn’t really built for this. It was too narrow for his shoulders, too shallow for your legs fully stretched out, and none of that mattered because Rex tucked himself around you like the furniture would answer to him if it became a problem.
After a while, his comm chirped once from where it had been dropped on the rug near the table. Rex didn’t move. You smiled a little into the blanket. “That’s new.”
His mouth brushed your shoulder when he answered. “Ignore it.”
“You ignore Jesse, and I’m sure he’ll take it well.”
That made your smile deepen. “Worse.”
Rex’s arm flexed around you. “Definitely ignore it.”
The comm chirped again, then fell silent. Neither of you made any move toward it. You lay there and watched the rain. Beneath the blanket, Rex’s body stayed wrapped around yours, heavy and warm and stubbornly present. Every time you shifted, even a little, he adjusted with you without waking fully from whatever exhausted drift he had put himself in. His hand never left your waist.
His mouth pressed once, briefly, to your shoulder. It wasn’t a kiss in the polished sense. It felt more like a seal, a tired little act of surrender. Then he settled again, forehead tucked near your collarbone under the blanket, breath evening out slower and slower while the city bled light beyond the glass. You stayed where you were, warm and held and still a little angry, though the anger had gone soft enough to live with.
Somewhere behind you on the rug, his armor remained in a scattered mess. The comm stayed unanswered. The whole Republic could wait another minute.
Wrapped in the blanket with Rex folded around you, you decided that was not your problem tonight.
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