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12h

An Experiment in Relaxation (ryland grace x reader)

also posted on ao3 | my masterlist A wet dream leaves you a little on edge. Grace is nothing if not a problem-solver, and he does not do things halfway. ~6.5k words; smut; a dash of voyeurism and exhibitionism; masturbation; vaginal fingering; hand job; Grace explains some anatomy to you during all this because he's a nerd; fem!reader (referred to with she/her pronouns) a/n: so you know how i said the other day that i wanted a break from smut? apparently i only needed like, a day LOL

Consciousness comes to you slowly, piece by piece, and with it is the awareness of the aching need between your thighs, the fragments of your dream adding fuel to the fire: someone hovering above you, mouthing at your neck, hands pressing fiery traces against your skin.

You turn onto your stomach. Your hips drag slowly against the blanket twisted up between your legs, still half in the dream, as you chase the ghost of someone’s touch. It has been so long, so long since someone felt you there, since you have allowed yourself to satiate that desire, and you find that you cannot spend another second without it. You need it, need it like air, like water, and it’s so close, that fall off of the cliff, the release of the tension that’s been building while you slept, and you think you can do it, just like this, rutting pathetically against the cotton, only barely awake.

There’s a sound, then, like a very quick tapping against glass, and—that’s exactly what it is, because Rocky is now in the dormitory, pattering his claws against his xenonite enclosure. “What is wrong, question?”

You fight the urge to groan, because you’re afraid it will come out like a whine. “Nothing. I’m fine. Just—a weird dream, that’s all.”

It’s a concept he barely understands, because Eridians simply do not dream, so he focuses instead on the physiological signs that scream out to him, clear as day. “Heartrate elevated. Breathing rapid. Not fine. Rocky will go get Grace.”

You want to scream, please don’t do that, because he will know exactly what is going on, but you can’t, because Rocky is gone as quickly as he had appeared. Frustration bubbles in your chest. You had been close, so close, and now the feeling is already slipping through your fingers like sand.

Grace rushes in. “So, Rocky made it sound like you were dying. Are you dying?”

“No. I’m fine.” Your face is pressed into your pillow, because there’s no way you can look at him right now. “I’m fine,” you repeat. “Go back to—whatever it is you were doing.”

He does not. “He was pretty panicked. What’s going on?”

Sometimes, you muse, it seems like everything would have been a lot easier if you hadn’t survived the coma. “Like I just told him, it was a dream. A weird dream. Please go.”

“Like—a nightmare? I get them too, you know. It’s alright, a totally natural thing, given the circumstances.” Instead of leaving, he walks closer to you, and you can hear his feet pad against the floor. “It’s just your subconscious sorting through things you’ve experienced, if that makes you feel any better. I’m pretty sure I read an article, before we left—so maybe it’s outdated at this point, I don’t know—but it said that dreams are one of the ways that we consolidate memories.”

It was definitely not a memory, because you’re pretty sure the dream had taken place on the ship, but you do not tell him this. “Great. Thanks. I am properly comforted. You can leave now.”

He takes another step forward. Why is he so bad at following instructions? “You don’t need to be embarrassed.” He’s so close to you, now, and you’re fairly certain that he’s squatting next to you, about to lay a comforting hand on your shoulder. And then there’s nothing, and it takes you half of a second to realize that he must finally be taking you in, the way that you’re laying on your stomach, hips slightly lifted over the twisted blanket wedged between your legs. “Oh. I see.”

Rocky runs back into the room. “Grace make diagnosis. Tell Rocky. Now.”

There is a terrifying moment, where you think that he’s about to actually tell Rocky what’s happening, because Grace likes to do this thing where he explains human biology in excruciating detail in the name of cross-species communication. “It’s alright, Rock. Like she said, it was a dream. They can—dreams can really affect the person having them, because the human brain believes that they’re real. So they can produce physiological effects. Nothing to worry about.”

“Oh. Okay. Strange. Rocky does not like. But understand.”

This is, apparently, enough for him, because he skitters back to his workshop. The room is silent, and you are trying to become one with the flooring beneath you. “I—what I said still stands,” Grace says, lowly. “Don’t feel embarrassed.”

You would like to tell him that it’s too late for that, at this point, because the past five minutes have just happened and can’t be taken back. Instead, you settle for sticking up your arm and giving him a thumbs up, which definitely does not make any of this more awkward than it already is.

Finally, he leaves, and you cannot find it within yourself to keep going.

A few days have passed. Neither of them have said anything. You’re starting to let yourself hope that you’re in the clear.

“So,” Grace speaks into the quiet, because Rocky has finally decided to go to sleep, and it is immediately apparent that you are not, in fact, in the clear, just by that single syllable. “About the other day.”

It would be an interesting experiment, you think, if you launched yourself out of the ship while moving at ninety-two percent the speed of light. You do not turn around from the panel you opened up in the wall so you could tinker with some of the wiring. “I don’t know what you’re referring to.”

He huffs a little. “Sure.”

“Don’t—don’t do that. I really don’t want to talk about it.”

“If you want to, you know. Rest for a little bit. I understand.” You’re pretty sure he’s smiling, as if this is just a funny thing that’s happening, as if it wasn't about the fact that you hadn’t had an orgasm in almost five years. In all fairness, you weren’t awake for four of those, but—still.

You very purposefully continue staring at your hands, even though they have long since stopped doing anything meaningful, when you finally speak next. “I’m not doing—that—while Rocky is in there sleeping. That’s just. I can’t do that.”

“Fair enough. The cockpit has a door.”

“Why are we still talking about this,” you say flatly. But then you keep going anyway, because this is, frankly, ridiculous. “And I don’t—where would I even, like, position myself in there for that?”

He’s still smiling, and you can tell even though you still haven’t turned around, and why is he suddenly choosing to torment you like this? Is he truly just that bored? “I mean. You could just sit in the chair.”

You snort. “Yeah, because that sounds super comfortable. I don’t really like—god, why am I even telling you this,” you mutter, “I like to be. Horizontal.”

“I see.” There’s something to his voice that’s difficult for you to pin down exactly, but it gives you the impression that Grace has a million more questions and is, for once in his life, trying to slowly meter them out instead of letting them go all at once. “What’s wrong with verticality?”

Of course he is phrasing it this way, and of course you are still going to answer, despite the fact that you would like to melt through the floor. “It’s just, I don’t know, a little uncomfortable.”

“So…even when you’re, you know, on top? Of someone, that is. It doesn’t really work for you?”

“That’s different.” The fascinating thing about this conversation is that neither of you are looking at each other, still, as if that makes it easier to have it, like you were casually discussing a repair on the ship or one of the taumoeba farms. For all you know, maybe that is what this is like for him: just a totally normal exchange about human biology. “I don’t really have a better explanation, but it’s just different than when I’m. By myself.”

He makes a little thoughtful hum, and you are struck with the realization that he is genuinely turning this all over in his head, not simply messing with you. You are not sure if you feel flattered that he wants to help, even if it is a very strange thing to decide to assist you with, or if you feel like you’ve been squished into a glass slide and are currently being examined underneath a microscope. “No, that makes sense. So cockpit’s out. Screen room?”

“I don’t think I’d be cool with all the screens, either,” you reply, because this is, apparently, an actual brainstorming session now. “I’d feel like I was being watched.”

“And you don’t like that. Being watched.”

“Well, not like that. It would be like the panopticon thing, or whatever. Too impersonal.” You think if he had a pen and paper in his hands—maybe he does, you don’t know—he’d be taking notes. “So not there, either.”

“Okay. Process of elimination means there’s only one room left.” Which is the room that you are currently in. And the room where he is, too, in case you’d forgotten, which you certainly have not.

You swallow hard. “And. Where would you be. In this scenario.”

“I could go to the cockpit? Or watch Rocky.”

This is starting to cross the line again of being too weird, so you lift your hands back up to the wiring in order to try and distract yourself. “It’s really fine, I appreciate that you’re trying to help and all, but. I don’t. I think if I knew you were in the other room, and that you knew what was happening, and we were both trying to act like that fact didn’t exist, I wouldn’t be able to relax enough. It’s fine,” you repeat. “Seriously. I will be okay. I’m not going to, like, explode or something.”

He’s finally quiet, then, and you begin to let yourself hope that the conversation is actually done and dusted this time. Then: “I could stay in here, then.”

Your hands jerk in surprise, and then your fingers catch an unprotected wire. “Ow, fuck—”

“Oh my gosh, are you alright?” Grace rushes over, and for the first time since this conversation started, you turn to look at him. “Let me see.” He grabs your hand and peers at it closely, bringing his glasses up from where they must have been hanging, under his chin, the whole time.

“I’m alright, it’s not that bad, it just hurts like a bitch.”

He glances up at you, over the rims of glasses, and quirks an eyebrow but otherwise does not comment on your language. “I think Armando has some cream. I’ll be back.”

Grace walks down into the dormitory before you can tell him, again, that you’re fine, and after a few minutes he returns with a little tube of cream, a pouch of water, a bandage. He gestures for you to sit at the table in the lab, and you sigh before acquiescing. His hands are gentle on yours as he pours a little bit of water on your right middle finger. You suck in a breath through your teeth but stay still. He dabs it dry with his shirt—that doesn’t really seem sanitary, but whatever—and then carefully applies a bit of the cream before finally sticking the bandage on.

“There,” he says. He’s still holding your hand, his thumb pressing into the middle of your palm. “Better?”

“Yeah. Thanks.”

“Sorry that I startled you and made you shock yourself.”

His thumb starts brushing little reassuring circles against your palm. It’s—it’s sending a different kind of electricity through you, arcing up your arm and down into the pit of your stomach. You shift in the chair. “It’s okay. I just—wasn’t expecting you to say that.”

Grace simply shrugs nonchalantly, although the tips of his ears are starting to redden. “It just seemed like the natural solution. To the problem.” Right. Because that’s really what he is, at the end of the day: a problem-solver, the kind that will obsess over the thing until it’s been resolved.

Two paths seem to branch out in front of you in that moment. Either you tell him to drop it, and then every time he looks at you for the rest of your life, you will wonder in the back of your mind if he’s still stuck on this, thinking about just how long you have gone without orgasming, or…

“We. I guess that. We could try.”

You had assumed that you would regret the words as soon as they left your mouth, but you find that you don’t, not when his eyes search yours and his tongue darts out to wet his lips. Your body feels like it is dialed up to a hundred, and all of that energy is starting to collect between your thighs, and you’re surprised that you’re not trembling. “Yeah?”

“Sure. Just. Don’t make it weird.”

He laughs a little at that. “I will try my best.”

Grace has created a little blanket nest for you on the floor of the lab. He even unclipped one of the mattress pads from its platform to maximize your comfort. It’s very sweet, even though you kind of feel like you might throw up from anxiety.

He sits down in the chair that he’s dragged toward the edge of the room, facing the bottom end of the blankets. You stand there for a second. Right. Clothes are probably the first step here, you think, looking down at your jumpsuit. You look back up at him. “Um. Could you close your eyes?”

This makes him huff out a laugh, but he does it anyways. “This feels a little redundant,” he says as you slowly unzip your suit and shuck it off, leaving you in a tank top and your underwear, because pants always feel insanely uncomfortable underneath the jumpsuit. “Unless you want me to have my eyes closed the whole time.”

“No, it’s just—leave me alone, okay, I don’t really know what I’m doing here.” You lay down on the pad and take a few moments to adjust and try to get comfortable. For a split second, you consider drawing one of the blankets over your bottom half, but eventually decide against it. It’s—you’re not really sure why, but it just feels like it wouldn’t help. “Okay,” you whisper. He opens his eyes, or at least you think that he does, because you’re currently staring up at the ceiling of the lab. “Um. I don’t really know where to start.”

This is a point where you assume he’s going to poke fun at you, or something, but he doesn’t. “What do you normally do?”

You clear your throat and fidget a little on top of the blankets. “Well. Usually I have. A thing that I use.”

“A—A toy?”

The slight hesitation is the only hint you get that he’s, possibly, just as nervous about this as you are. “Yeah. I’m assuming we don’t have one of those on here.”

“Ah, no, I don’t think so. I mean…we could…if we used some of…” Is he—he’s thinking through how he might build a sex toy.

“Anyway. And sometimes I’m. Reading something. Or. Watching. Something.” You’re starting to think that you might not be able to do this, and that you should probably just call this whole thing off, because now you’re worried he’s going to suggest pulling up porn or something on one of the laptops.

He does not, but you still don’t expect what he does end up saying. “What was the dream about?”

You keep staring at the ceiling. “Um. It was just kind of a basic sex dream, I don’t know. Listen, maybe we should—”

“Close your eyes,” he interrupts you. “Think back on it.”

It is either very admirable or a little creepy that he is so intent on helping you with this. Regardless, you do as he says, letting your eyes drift shut and trying to recall the details of the dream that had landed you in this whole mess. “There was—I was laying down, and there was someone above me.”

Grace hums lowly. “What were they doing?”

“I remember…hands. His hands were sort of all over. And it was. Nice.” That heat you had felt when you had first awoken from the dream is starting to return, simmering just beneath your skin, as you recall the paths that had been traced fervently along your body.

“Start there, then.”

You nod wordlessly, still keeping your eyes closed, and your hands shake a little as you bring them up and hesitantly drag them along your sides, across your stomach, over your thighs. Grace’s chair creaks a little, but instead of the sound breaking you out of it, it makes you feel a little bolder, especially when you can hear him take in a long, deep breath as your fingers brush over your peaked nipples through the fabric of your shirt. “Now what?”

Another creak. You almost want to open your eyes and lean up on your elbows, to see what he’s doing that’s causing the sound, but that means stopping your hands in their movement. “Maybe—over your underwear?”

Jesus Christ, maybe you will explode. A little noise finds its way from the back of your throat and out of your lips. One of your hands leaves your chest and trails down, down, down, past the hem of your shirt, until it finally hovers just above the apex of your thighs. A few more circles with your other hand, and then you carefully, experimentally push down your fingers over your underwear. Your hips immediately roll to meet them, and another breathy sound leaves your mouth.

Grace clears his throat. “There are over ten thousand nerve fibers right there, just below your fingers. In case you didn’t know that.”

You smile and arch your back a little. Of course this would turn into an anatomy lesson. “I didn’t, but I—I’m getting the picture, right about now,” and the last word comes out with a whine as the movement of both of your hands start to fall in time together. Pleasure blooms and spreads through your body, and your eyes squeeze a little tighter, and you find that you don’t really need to think of the dream anymore, that what’s happening right now is doing it for you better than the memory of an imagined touch could.

When he finally speaks again, his voice is low and strained. “I think you could—if you wanted—you know. Skin-on-skin is probably more efficient.”

“Like this?” Your hand slips underneath the waistband of your underwear, and he lets out a choked mm-hm, and you cannot believe that you agreed to do this, and that he suggested it, and that you are already so wet just from touching yourself through the fabric of your clothes, from him watching you do it. You gather a little bit of your slickness on your index finger before slowly circling your clit. Screw the ten thousand, you’re pretty sure there’s a billion nerves right there, right at the tips of your fingers; you don’t bother holding back your moan, then, and your hips buck when you hear Grace’s sharp inhale.

You had assumed this probably wouldn’t take that long, but your hand is already starting to feel cramped underneath the fabric, so you slowly open your eyes and still your hand, drawing it out so you can drag your underwear down. You have to sit up a little to get them off all the way, and then you finally look at Grace to see him leaning forward, his elbows on his thighs and his hands clasped tightly together, his glasses hanging on for dear life as they dangle beneath his face.

He meets your eyes, then, and the look he gives you—it’s like there is simply nothing he would rather be watching, in this moment, and your thighs squeeze involuntarily at the thought. This is weird, this should feel so weird, because you’re half-naked on the floor while he watches you, waiting for you to start touching yourself again, but all you can feel is the headiness in your mind that spreads to your limbs, the ache in your core, the tight desire in your chest.

So you lay back down, but you keep your eyes open, half-lidded. “My hand was getting uncomfortable,” you sigh. Your fingers begin moving again, and it is so much better without the fabric pressing you down, with the cool recycled air of the ship brushing against your wetness.

“I bet.” He shifts in the chair, again, before continuing. “It looks like—you favor one side of it. Your clit.”

You wonder if his face warmed at saying that, if he’s hard in his sweatpants right now, even as he analyzes what you’re doing as if he needed to write a report on it later. “Mm-hm,” you gasp. Your other hand drags back up to your breast again, circling the beaded peak there through your shirt. “I don’t—know why—just feels better. The other side is, it’s, too sensitive.”

“Maybe the nerves aren’t evenly distributed? Like, they’re more concentrated—oh, my God,” he chokes out, because your fingers have just made an absolutely obscene noise as they swipe down through your slickness again, and your head has tipped back into the blanket. “Sorry, I’m, anyway, it’s possible that—that more of your nerves are concentrated on the other side.”

You laugh, then, and the sound is tinged with a whine. Your fingers move a little faster, because you think you’re almost getting there, not to the crest of it, not yet, but to the steady buildup that comes right before it. But the bandage keeps scraping against the sensitive skin there, and then you’re thinking about whether it’s unsanitary for the burn, and the buildup is gone as quick as it had arrived. “Fuck,” you groan in frustration. “Sorry, it’s the—stupid bandage—”

There’s a moment of quiet, then, and you think maybe you’ll have to wait until another day, when you can take the bandage off, but then he’s getting up out of the chair and kneeling down beside you. “Can you keep it to the side—like this?” Grace gently grabs the burned finger, careful not to touch anything else, even though you are starting to think that maybe you really, really want him to, and lays it to the side, almost to the crease of your hip. “Is that okay?”

“Um, maybe? Let me…” You do a slow circle over your clit while keeping your middle finger out of the way. With Grace now right next to you, you can see him, even with your head laid back, can see the way he tracks the movement with narrowed focus. “It’s—I guess it’s fine?”

“You guess?” He glances up at you, and the corner of his mouth lifts. It’s almost at odds with the flush of his cheeks, the flare of his nostrils as he breathes deeply. “We don’t want fine. We want good. Great, even.”

What an overachiever. You smile and roll your eyes playfully. “It’s just, I normally use that finger to, sort of, like, hold stuff out of the way.”

He nods and looks back down at your hand. “The labia majora?” The overly-clinical-speak should really be taking you out of it. It does not. You nod. “Okay. That’s an easy fix.” His hand slides over your hip, then, and gently spreads you open, still not touching you where you have decided in the last thirty seconds that you definitely, not maybe, would like him to. The feeling of his hand there, the comforting pressure of it, makes you shudder. “Try it now.”

There’s a joke somewhere, floating in the back of your mind, about how he is literally troubleshooting your masturbation—what’s next, is he going to tell you to turn it off and back on again—but you say nothing, instead dipping your finger down to lube it up again before pressing it against your clit. It’s—the sensation has doubled, tripled with his hand right there, and your head lolls to the side as you exhale shakily. “That did the trick, I think.”

“Good. That’s—really good. You are.” You look at him curiously, even though it strains your eyes a little with your face pressed against the blanket, when he doesn’t finish the sentence. Grace is simply looking with rapt attention at the way your finger moves, and his lips part slightly. “Sorry,” he apologizes again. His fingers flex against you, and your cunt squeezes at the feeling. “I think. I am hitting a point where the words are not working.”

“Never thought I’d see the day,” you laugh breathily. It turns into a moan as you adjust the pressure you’re applying, and you can just barely see the way his eyelids flutter and how the hand that’s not in use clenches into a fist against his thigh.

There is a new problem, now: it all feels so incredible, of course, but now his hand is right there, and he’s watching you so closely, and you are swiftly realizing that this is probably not going to happen for you until he actually does something.

You have to take a deep breath to gather yourself enough for this. “Grace. I need. Um.”

“Yes, yes, what is it? What can I do?” Something clenches in your chest at his fervor, that he is so desperate to help you with this problem.

“I’m just. Okay. I feel like whatever boundary we were pretending was there doesn’t actually exist, and I think that I really, really need you to touch me. More than you already are,” you tack on, before he decides to be pedantic about it.

He nods feverishly. “Yep, that sounds great, perfect, even, what should I—what do you want me to do?”

Your hips shift. It is insanely unfair that he is making you say all of this out loud. “Could you—your fingers? Inside?”

His eyes fall shut at that, and he groans quietly, still nodding. You expect that he’s going to say something, either a string of words that don’t really make sense together grammatically, or some anatomical explanation of your vagina, or even a description of the optimal angle and technique for this; but he surprises you, again, because he simply opens his eyes and nods, one final time, before unclenching the hand on top of his leg and slowly brushing his fingers over your cunt.

You shiver, even though he still hasn’t really done anything yet. This statement is immediately retracted when one of his fingers slowly presses inside of you. “So tight,” he observes. “How long…? I mean, not that—it’s a pretty elastic thing, you know, but.”

“Longer than, than the coma, that’s for sure.” You resume pressing circles into your clit, gasping and whining, because even just the one finger slowly dragging against your walls provides a delirious kind of fullness. “And. And you?”

He huffs. “Pretty much the same.”

In that moment, you resolve that once you’ve orgasmed, you are going to do everything in your power to make him come, because the tiny little noises he’s been making so far are addictive, and you want, need to know what the real ones sound like. And you want to give this to him, because he has gone out of his way to do this for you, and oh, now there’s a second finger, and you lift your hips to meet their thrust.

The friction against your clit has started to become a little uncomfortable, so you try to slide your finger down to gather up some more of your wetness, but it bumps into Grace’s. “Sorry, my finger’s just. A little dry.”

There is not a world in which you are prepared for the thing that he does next, when he dips his head a little and lets some of his saliva drip from his lips onto your slit. Your finger gathers it up greedily, and it’s exactly what you needed, and you clench around his fingers as you resume your own movements.

“So, holy shit, what the fuck was that,” you gasp, not even bothering to watch the swearing like you normally do, because it’s one of his favorite ways to mess with you.

He merely grins, never stopping the careful rhythm of his hand. “What? Saliva’s a great lubricant. It’s a coagulant, too, fun fact.”

“That doesn’t really—explain—you doing it like that. Could have used my own.”

“Nah. This is faster,” and then he lets a little more drip down, and you are fairly certain that image is now branded into your mind forever and will most likely revisit you in your dreams.

For a while, there’s nothing but the sounds of his fingers, and your moans, and every so often a little sound of his own, and your earlier resolve is strengthened. You are so close, so much closer than earlier, and your other hand starts grasping your breast again, tweaking the bud of your nipple, in an effort to get that final push you need.

Grace’s eyes flick up—it almost seems like he has to physically tear himself away from watching both of your hands moving in between your thighs—and he speaks up again. “I have an idea.” His fingers shift a little as he says it, and the new angle is heavenly, forcing you to really have to concentrate on his words. “And I think that you will be amenable to it.”

Does he have, like, a thesaurus memorized, or something? ‘Amenable’? “I don’t really need the play-by-play,” you nearly whimper, “Just do it, and I will probab-ly—”

He leans forward to replace the hand on your breast with his mouth before you can finish your sentence, lapping at the bud of your nipple through your shirt, because apparently moving that out of the way would take too long.

“Hah, yeah, definitely—amenable to that—Grace,” and the sound of his name falling from your lips makes him groan, but his tongue still doesn’t stop, and neither do his fingers. “Oh, my God, I am so—do not change anything you’re doing, please.”

You think he might be about to respond, but he doesn’t get the chance, because finally, finally the release is there, cresting and breaking and rolling through you, and you clamp down around on his fingers, and your free hand flies out to clutch at his shoulder. His head lifts from your chest, and maybe if you were still cogent, you would protest at this, but then you realize that he’s watching you with wide, glassy eyes, taking in the way your body shakes and your mouth falls open with a cry. His glasses, you manage to note, have vanished somewhere in the middle of all of this.

As the high finally subsides, you twitch from the overstimulation of your finger, because it’s still moving, and after a few more gentle brushes against your clit you move your hand up to rest on your lower stomach, breathing heavily. Grace pulls his hand back then, too, and after a beat you watch as he sticks his fingers in his mouth.

“I didn’t know,” you gasp in between breaths, “that you were kind of a little freak.”

He wipes his hand on his pants after he’s done licking them off. “To be honest. Neither did I.”

A surprised laugh is ripped out of you, and after a few seconds he starts laughing with you. When the two of you quiet, you slowly sit up. “Alright. Your turn.”

His eyes widen. “Oh, that’s not—it’s really okay, you don’t need to do that.”

You look at him flatly. “Grace. You just gave me what was, probably, the best orgasm of my life. Just let me—I would really like to return the favor. Please.”

“Yeah. Okay. I mean. I would probably be pretty insane to say no.”

Oh. That’s kind of a weird way to say yes. “Um. If you, like, actually don’t want to, we don’t have to. I can just go…clean up, or something.”

“No, that’s not. I’m sorry, this is not at all coming out the way I would like it to,” he rushes out. “I’m going to be so honest. Embarassingly honest. I am so hard, and I don’t think any of my blood is going to my brain at the moment.”

Both of you dissolve into laughter again, even while you gently grasp his shoulders and maneuver him to lay down, as you find his glasses on the floor next to the blankets and slide them onto his face. A realization pops into your mind as you look at him, your hands resting on his chest while you kneel beside him. “So. I know your fingers were literally just inside me, and so this might be a little bit of a stupid question, but. Is it alright if I kiss you? We just kind of didn’t that whole time, and I wasn’t sure—”

“Please,” he breathes. “Yes, please do that.”

You can taste yourself on his mouth when you lean forward and press your lips to his, when you lick into him and he groans. Meanwhile, your hand slowly slides down—you’ll have to use your left, because you imagine the bandage would not feel great for him, not with what you would like to do—and pauses at the hem of his shirt. You slip your fingers underneath it, just for a moment, so you can feel the skin there, before your hand keeps moving in its descent. As you palm him through his sweatpants, you are delighted not only to confirm his earlier admission, but also to discover that, yes, the real sounds he’s making right now are so, so much better than the little ones he was letting out earlier.

“Hah,” he gasps into your mouth, “just—a warning—this is not going to take me that long.”

You pull back a little and laugh, still stroking the length of him through his pants. “I do not even have the words to tell you how much I do not care about that.”

Grace simply gives you a small thumbs-up, which is so delightfully him, and then he watches as you sit up more fully to pull his pants down, and then his underwear. It is—he really was not kidding, because he looks almost painfully hard, and the tip is already red and leaking onto him, and then you’re imagining what he’ll look like with his cum on his stomach, so you drag his shirt up a little before finally drawing your fingers over his cock.

You watch, a little dazed, as he twitches and his abdominal muscles contract, and you think you understand a bit more now why he was so adamant on watching you. You glance at his hands, which are fisted in the blankets, and then at his face. It’s completely flushed, and somehow his glasses are already skewed again, and he’s looking at you with his eyebrows drawn.

Another idea pops into your head. You’re still not wearing any pants. Or underwear. This is very convenient. You make a whole show of gathering your lingering wetness on your hand, and then you spit into it for good measure, and Grace looks like he is about to combust. You grin and carefully spread the mixture of your saliva and slickness onto him, from the base to the tip, and the whine he lets out is so good that you consider abandoning this plan to just ride him instead.

But, well—you’re definitely not prepared for that, you realize as you start sliding your hand up-and-down, because two fingers is definitely not enough now that you’ve seen and felt the size of him. You let yourself hope, for a brief second, that there will be a next time for that, and then you turn your focus entirely on the task at hand. Literally.

His hips jerk up into your hand. “Holy, crap,” he groans, “this is—you are so—I meant what I said, I am not going to last that long.”

Your other hand draws his shirt up a little more so you can slide it against his skin, across his stomach, up to his chest. “And I meant what I said,” you parrot back, “I really do not care.”

Your hand does this little twist, and he bucks up, so you keep doing it, testing different rhythms until you find the one that makes his eyes squeeze shut and one of his hands release the blanket so it can grasp your arm instead.

“That’s it, Grace,” you coo. “You’re doing so good for me.”

“What—was that,” he gasps, pressing his face to the side, skewing his glasses even further, “about me being a little freak?”

You simply smile and say nothing, happy to take in all his sounds and the way his chest heaves underneath your hand. You are, apparently, full of ideas at the moment—maybe orgasming is just that intellectually stimulating for you—because then you slide a curious finger over his nipple, and—

You desperately hope that you will never forget the way he keens, then, the way he chokes out that he’s close and then keeps babbling, right up until the words run out and his cum is spurting onto his abdomen.

“That,” you breath, watching the way he twitches, because your hand is still slowly moving around his cock, “was probably the hottest thing I have ever seen.”

It takes him a few moments to get to a place where he could begin to string words together in a way that makes sense, but before he can, just to fuck with him, you swipe your finger through his spend and bring it to your mouth. You’re pretty sure he stops breathing as he watches. “You—you’re killing me here. I’ve passed. I have simply passed away.”

You giggle around your finger. “Before you can even say ‘I told you so,’ I will admit that this was not as bad of an idea as I originally feared. And I would also like to request that this is not a one-time thing.”

Grace looks at you, utterly surprised, because it seems like only doing this once was not an idea that had even crossed his mind until you said it. “I feel like you’re forgetting the ten thousand nerves thing from earlier. It means back-to-back orgasms are not just possible, but, like, probably necessary. I think I read somewhere once that record is somewhere in the hundreds.”

“Okay. Maybe we start with two.”

He grins as you lean forward to kiss him again. “Two is good. But can I bargain for three? This is very important for the experiment.”

“Hush. We’ll see.”