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Headcannon: ryland x cockwarming

(pls pls pls pls pls)

Thermal Equilibrium Ryland Grace/Reader | Explicit, MDNI | ~4.7k words

Tags: cockwarming, established relationship, humor, explicit, fully au, domestic au, one-shot, female reader insert, he will not stop talking, the experiment gets away from him

You wanted stillness. He wanted to understand stillness, which is a different thing entirely, and requires a methodology, and apparently several variables he needs to isolate. The problem is Ryland Grace has never been quiet for more than eleven seconds in his life, and right now he is very warm, very inside you, and extremely busy explaining thermodynamics.

[ Cross posted on Ao3 ] [ fic masterlist ]

There is a particular kind of quiet that only happens when Ryland Grace has run out of things to say, and you have learned, over the better part of a year, that it never lasts longer than it takes him to think of one more thing.

Right now it has lasted eleven seconds. You are counting, because counting is contagious and you have caught it from him like a cold.

You are in his lap. Properly in his lap, settled all the way down, the both of you bare and warm under the good blanket on the couch that smells like him and faintly like the lemon thing he uses on his hands. His back is against the armrest. Your knees are bracketing his hips. He is inside you and neither of you is doing anything about it.

It is a Saturday, which is relevant context. Saturdays in this apartment have a shape: he sleeps in until some ungodly hour like eight, makes coffee badly, grades a stack of seventh-grade lab reports at the kitchen table while reading the funniest answers aloud whether you ask him to or not, and then somewhere around early afternoon, having run out of obligations, he gets restless in his skin and goes looking for something to investigate. Usually that means a kitchen experiment or taking apart the toaster that works fine. Today it meant you, and a thing he read about, and a careful negotiation conducted mostly while undressing.

So now it is mid-afternoon, the light coming sideways and gold through the blinds, a half-graded lab report still face down on the coffee table where he abandoned it, his glasses the only thing he is still technically wearing, and you are sitting full and still in his lap conducting research. There is a mug of his terrible coffee going cold on the side table. There is a documentary he put on hours ago and forgot about, paused on a frame of a jellyfish. The apartment has the specific stillness of a weekend with nowhere to be, and into that stillness he has introduced the one experiment guaranteed to test it.

That is the entire arrangement. That is the whole plan. He is inside you, and you are simply sitting there, and the rule, the single rule he himself laid down with the gravity of a man chalking an equation onto a board, is that nobody moves.

It was his idea.

You want that on the record, because in about ninety seconds it is going to stop being relevant to him that it was his idea, and you intend to remind him.

His hands are resting on your hips. Not gripping. Resting, the way you rest your hands on something you are trying very hard not to touch. His glasses have already gone askew. You did not do that. He did that, somewhere in the last eleven seconds, by frowning thoughtfully at the middle distance over your shoulder.

"Okay," he says.

You wait.

"Okay, so," he says, and stops again, and his hands tighten by maybe two millimeters, and you feel the whole length of him go a little harder inside you in a way that is involuntary and that he absolutely registers, because his breath catches and then he says, with enormous dignity, "that's just data."

"That's data," you agree.

"That's the experiment working."

"Mm."

"The experiment is going great."

The experiment is going great the way a soufflé is going great in the thirty seconds before it isn't.

—

It started, as a frankly indecent number of things start with him, with an article.

You don't even know where he finds them. He surfaces from his phone roughly twice a week with some new fact lodged in him like a splinter, and you have learned to recognize the symptoms: the eyebrows go up, the phone comes down, and he turns to you with the expression of a golden retriever that has found a second tennis ball.

Three nights ago the symptoms had presented over dinner.

"Did you know," he had said, around a mouthful of the pasta, which is a sentence that has preceded some of the strangest conversations of your adult life, "that people do a thing where the guy just. Stays in. On purpose. And nothing happens."

You had put down your fork. "I'm familiar with the concept, yeah."

"You're familiar with it." He had pointed his own fork at you, delighted, betrayed, thrilled. "Okay, see, this is the thing about you. I bring you a fact and you already have the fact. How do you already have the fact."

"It's a fairly well known fact."

"It is not a well known fact, it is a fact I just learned, which by definition makes it cutting edge." He had leaned in. "But okay, here's what I don't get. Walk me through the appeal. Because as far as I can tell the appeal is, and I want to make sure I'm reading this right, the appeal is nothing. The appeal is that nothing happens. You go to all this trouble to get into a position where historically a great deal happens, and then, on purpose, like monks, you make nothing happen."

"It's about closeness," you had said. "Being close. Staying connected. It's not about the friction, it's about the. You know. The being."

He had stared at you for a moment with the specific stricken wonder of a man encountering a foreign cuisine he has decided he must understand from the inside out.

"The being," he had repeated.

"The being."

He had set his fork down entirely at that point, which is how you know a thing has truly taken hold of him, because Ryland Grace abandoning food mid-meal is a seismic event.

"Okay, but here's my problem," he had said. "And it's a methodology problem. Because everything I'm good at, everything, the whole skill set, it's all about doing. You give me a problem, I poke it, I take it apart, I build a worse version and then a better version, I run it twenty times. Right? That's the move. That's the only move I have." He had gestured with both hands, knocking the salt over, ignoring it. "And you're telling me there's a whole, a whole discipline, where the entire point is to not do the thing. To just hold still and let it happen to you. That's. I don't even have the wiring for that. That's like asking a shark to stop swimming and appreciate the ocean."

"Sharks do have to keep swimming, though."

"Exactly! Thank you! That's my entire point! I'm a shark!" He had been thrilled to be a shark. "I would die. Conceptually. If I stopped."

"It's not really a swim-or-die situation."

"Everything's a swim-or-die situation if you think about it hard enough," he had said, which is the single most Ryland thing he has ever said at a dinner table, and you had married the idea of him a little further in your head right then, the way you do about twice a week.

"I need to try this," he had said, the way other men announce they need to see a specialist.

So here you are. Being.

—

"It's basically thermal equilibrium," he says now, twelve, thirteen seconds into the quiet, because he cannot leave a silence the way some people cannot leave a hangnail.

"Is it."

"It's totally thermal equilibrium. Okay, imagine, no, okay. You've got two objects, right, two bodies, different temperatures, and you put them in contact, and heat flows from the hot one to the cold one until they hit the same temperature and then. Nothing. Net zero. No more heat moving. That's equilibrium. That's us. We're two bodies that have reached the same temperature and now there's no net flow and it's peaceful, it's the most peaceful thing in the universe, it's the heat death of the universe except cozy."

"You've made cockwarming about the heat death of the universe."

"I've made it cozy," he says, wounded. "Were you listening. Cozy heat death. That's the whole pitch."

You shift your weight. Just barely. Just enough to settle a little deeper, not even on purpose, the kind of small adjustment a body makes on its own when it's getting comfortable.

His hands clamp down on your hips like he's bracing for reentry.

"Don't," he says, strangled. "Don't, that's, you can't do that, that's against the rules, those are my rules."

"I didn't do anything."

"You did a thing."

"I breathed."

"You breathed with intent."

You hold very still, and you let your face do nothing at all, which you have discovered is the single most devastating weapon in your arsenal where he is concerned. Ryland Grace can survive almost anything except an audience that refuses to react.

He looks at you for a long moment. His glasses are now at a genuinely impressive angle. There is a flush coming up his throat that you can feel more than see, the warmth of him radiating where your chest is against his.

"You're really good at this," he says, and it comes out almost accusatory.

"At sitting still?"

"At sitting still. Yeah. You're a natural. It's annoying. I'm the one who proposed the study and you're out here being zen about it and I'm." He swallows. "I'm having a lot of thoughts."

"What kind of thoughts."

"Scientific ones."

"Uh huh."

"Rigorous ones," he insists, and then his hips do a thing, the smallest unconscious flex upward, barely a centimeter, the kind of motion a body makes entirely without consulting its owner, and you both feel it, and he says "okay that wasn't me, that was an autonomic response, that doesn't count, the brain didn't authorize that."

"The brain's not really running the show right now, is it."

"The brain," he says with dignity, "is collecting valuable data."

The thing about him, the thing you fell for somewhere around the second month, is that he cannot do anything without trying to understand it, and he cannot try to understand a thing without poking it.

So of course he starts adjusting variables.

It begins almost innocently. His hands, which have been gripping your hips like handles, gentle, and start to move. Not anywhere scandalous. Up your sides, slow, mapping. You recognize the touch. It's the same touch he uses on a problem, the same patient curious pressure he puts on anything he's trying to figure out, and the fact that the thing he's trying to figure out is you makes something low in your stomach pull tight.

"So like," he murmurs, and his thumbs have found the dip of your waist and settled there, "the interesting thing is the anticipation, right, because nothing's happening, so your nervous system is just. Idling. It's revving. It's like sitting at a red light with the engine going." His thumbs stroke once. "Everything's primed and there's nowhere for it to go."

"You're narrating," you tell him.

"I narrate, it's a whole thing, you knew this going in." His mouth has wandered to your jaw. Not kissing. Just resting there, breathing you in, talking against your skin so you feel every word as much as hear it. "The question I have, the real research question, is whether the stillness amplifies sensation or dulls it, because there's an argument both ways. Like on one hand, no new stimulus, so you'd think it'd fade. Habituation. You stop feeling your own socks after a minute, right. But on the other hand."

He goes quiet.

You wait.

"On the other hand," he says, and his voice has dropped about half an octave, "I can feel your pulse."

You go still in a different way.

"Right here," he says, soft, wondering, the wonder doing the thing it always does where it stops being funny and starts being unbearable. "I can feel your heartbeat. From the inside. I didn't, I didn't know I'd be able to feel that. It's going kind of fast, by the way. For someone so zen."

"Shut up."

"I'm just collecting data."

"Collect it quietly."

"That's not really my strong suit," he says against your throat, and you can feel him grin, and then he goes thoughtful in the specific dangerous way that means he's had an idea. His hand slides up your spine to the back of your neck, cradling. "Okay, new variable, hold on, I want to isolate one thing." And he tips his head and kisses you. Slow. Deep. The kind of kiss that has a thesis. The whole time his other hand stays flat and still on your hip, anchoring you down onto him, so the only thing moving anywhere between the two of you is his mouth on yours, and somehow that makes it worse, makes the stillness everywhere else roar.

When he pulls back his pupils are blown and he looks genuinely rattled by his own findings.

"Yeah, that's, okay, that did something," he reports, a little hoarse. "That changed the readings. The readings are way up. I felt you do that thing, the clench thing, you did the clench thing when I kissed you, don't tell me you didn't, I have direct evidence."

"That's not fair."

"Science isn't fair," he says, delighted and wrecked. "Science is just true."

"That's not what that means."

"It's what it means tonight," he says, and then, because he is who he is, because the curiosity is always going to win, his hands slide around to your back and pull you in that final fraction so there is no space left anywhere between you, and he exhales like a man who has just understood something. "Oh, that's the appeal. Okay. Okay, yeah. I get it now. I get the being."

And the worst part, the part that undoes you, is that he means it. He's not performing. He has genuinely, in this moment, with his glasses crooked and his heart hammering against your chest and himself buried as deep in you as he can get without moving, arrived at a real understanding of why people do this, and the understanding has cracked something open in him, and the something is tenderness, and it is pouring out of him at a rate his mouth cannot keep up with.

"You're a menace," you tell him, but your voice has gone unsteady.

"I'm a scientist," he says, and kisses you.

That's where it starts to come apart, and it comes apart on his end first, which is exactly how you both secretly knew it would go.

Because once he's kissing you he can't stop talking into the kisses, and once he's talking he's getting worked up, and once he's worked up his hands won't stay still, and his hands not staying still means his whole body wants to follow, and the entire structure of the experiment is now resting on the willpower of a man who has never successfully resisted finding out what happens next.

"The hypothesis," he says against your mouth, breathing hard, "the hypothesis was that I could just. Be. Be in the moment. Very enlightened. Very still."

"Mm hm."

"I want to flag that the hypothesis is in trouble."

"Is it."

"It's in serious trouble. We may need to revise the hypothesis. The hypothesis may need to be that I have the self control of a, of a, I don't even have an analogy, that's how bad it is, the analogy generator is offline."

You almost laugh, and then you make a decision, and you do not move at all.

You stay completely, perfectly, infuriatingly still. You let him do all the wanting. You sit there, warm and soft and unhurried in his lap, and you watch the experiment he designed turn around and start running him.

His hips flex again. He catches it. Stops.

His breath shudders out.

"Okay, I'm controlling for breathing," he announces, to nobody, to the ceiling, in the voice of a man clutching the last shred of his methodology. "If I just regulate the breathing, right, box breathing, in for four, hold for four, the Navy SEALs do it, I read a thing, I can bring the whole system back down to baseline and then I can. I can just." He takes a slow, deliberate, theatrical breath in, and you feel his chest expand against yours, and you feel exactly what that does to the rest of him where he's seated inside you, and so does he, because the breath comes out as a wreck instead of a four-count. "Okay, the breathing makes it worse. Filing that. Breathing is contraindicated. Who knew. Everybody, probably. Everybody knew."

"You're doing great."

"I'm doing terribly, and we both know it, and the cruel thing, the genuinely cruel thing, is that you're enjoying watching me do terribly."

You are. You make absolutely no effort to hide it.

"You could just," he tries.

"Mm?"

"You could just move. A little. Hypothetically. For science."

"But it was so peaceful," you say. "The cozy heat death. I was really getting into the being."

He makes a sound that is not a word.

"You said nobody moves," you remind him sweetly. "Those were the rules. Your rules."

"I have done extensive research since I made those rules," he says, very fast. "There's new data. The rules are out of date. I'm issuing a correction. A formal correction. I was wrong, the original parameters were flawed, I'd like to move now please, I'd really like to move, I think about thirty seconds ago I would have said I could do this all day and I want to retract that, I want it stricken from the record, please."

"You're begging."

"I am peer reviewing," he gasps, and his hands are gripping you again, white knuckled, and the flush has gone all the way up to his hairline, and his glasses are so far gone they're practically vertical, and he is the single most undone you have ever seen a fully verbal human being get, and he has not moved an inch, because the one thing more powerful in him than the wanting is the part of him that will not, ever, be the one to break a rule he set for the experiment, even as the experiment dismantles him in real time.

It is, you decide, the most him thing you have ever witnessed.

So you take pity on him.

You lean in, your lips against the shell of his ear, and you feel him go rigid with hope, and you say, very quietly, "Okay."

And you move.

The sound he makes when you finally roll your hips is not dignified, and you treasure it, because Ryland Grace has been talking for what feels like a geological age and you have rendered him, for one perfect second, completely silent.

It lasts exactly that one second.

"Oh thank god," he breathes, and then he's moving, finally, hips driving up to meet you as you sink back down, and the first real slide of him is so much after all that holding that you both make a noise into it. His hands clamp on your hips and drag you down onto him, all the way, deep enough that you feel it in your stomach, and the relief in him is so total it's almost a religious experience. He's laughing, breathless and a little wild, the way he laughs when something works. "Oh, okay, yeah, no, this, this is the appeal, I had it backwards, the appeal is when you stop, the stopping is the appeal because then there's the. The." He loses the word as you grind down hard and feel him twitch inside you. "The starting. God. The starting is the whole thing. Don't stop, do not stop, that's an official finding."

"I thought it was about the being."

"It's about the becoming," he says, which is either profound or completely meaningless, and you don't care which, because his hands are everywhere now and his mouth has found your throat and the careful, agonizing stillness of the last however-long has wound you both so tight that every drag of him in and out of you lands like something much bigger than it is. You're slick enough that there's no friction left to fight, just the slow obscene ease of taking all of him and lifting off and taking him again, and the wet sound of it fills the quiet where his voice used to be.

You set the pace. He lets you. That's the deal you've worked out over months, that he can run his mouth about variables and equilibria all he likes but in the end he goes pliant and grateful under your hands, follows wherever you take him. So you take him slow. You ride him in long unhurried strokes, drawing all the way up until he's barely inside you, until he's panting and his fingers are flexing helplessly against your skin, and then down again, slow, slow, watching his eyes roll back. The contrast, the manic brilliant chatterbox going soft and obedient and wrecked underneath you, is something you will never, ever get tired of.

"You held out," you tell him, rolling your hips in a slow grind that has him gasping. "You actually held out. I'm impressed."

"I'm a professional." His voice is shredded. "I'm extremely. Professional. I had a hypothesis and I tested it and the hypothesis was that I'd die, and I was right, I'm dying, this is what dying is, write it down," and the last word breaks in half as you clench around him on a downstroke, deliberate, just to watch it happen.

His head goes back against the armrest. "Okay, that's, you can't just, that's not in the protocol, you can't do that," but his hips are snapping up into you now, losing the rhythm, chasing it, all his careful method dissolving into want. One of his hands leaves your hip and slides between you, thumb finding you exactly where you need it because of course he knows, he has studied you the way he studies everything, and the first slow circle he draws makes your whole body jolt down onto him.

"There she is," he says, ragged and delighted and reverent all at once. "Okay. Okay, I've got data on this, I know what this does," and he does it again, steady pressure in time with the way you're riding him, and the two sensations stack and stack and you stop being able to keep your pace even. "Yeah. Yeah, there you go. You're allowed to fall apart, that's, I'd actually really like to observe that, for science, please, I want to feel it."

"You're going to make me," you manage.

"That's the entire research objective," he gasps. "That was always the objective. Come on. Come on, I've got you, I'm right here, I'm not going anywhere, I'm cozy heat death, remember, no net flow," and he's babbling now, half nonsense, his thumb relentless and his hips driving up to bury himself in you again and again, and the wound-tight pressure that's been building since the very first still minute finally crests and breaks. You come hard around him, clenching tight, and you hear him swear, genuinely swear, the fear-gauge profanity he saves for when the floor drops, because the feeling of you tightening on him is the thing that finally takes him too. He pulls you down flush and holds you there and lets go with a broken sound against your throat, hips stuttering up into you, spilling deep while you're still pulsing around him, both of you locked together at the exact point where neither of you can tell whose shaking is whose.

For a long moment there is no net flow at all. Just the two of you, joined, gasping, finding the same temperature.

When you finally lift your head he's looking at you with his crooked glasses and his blown pupils and that specific expression he gets, the one underneath all the noise, the one that you don't think he knows he makes. The one that says you are the most interesting thing that has ever happened to him and he cannot believe his luck and he is a little bit scared of how much he means it.

He gets there late. He gets there sideways. But he gets there.

"Hey," he says, soft, and for once there's no preamble, no analogy, no okay-so. Just: "I'm really glad it was you who already knew the fact."

Your heart does something complicated.

"Why's that," you manage.

"Because I would've been embarrassed to be this bad at sitting still in front of anyone else," he says, and grins, and ruins the moment perfectly, on purpose, the way he always does the second a feeling gets too big to hold, and you love him so much in that instant that you have to close your eyes.

---

You stay like that for a while, the two of you, not moving for an entirely different reason now. He's still inside you, softening, and neither of you is in any hurry to change that, which strikes you as funny given that not moving was the whole problem twenty minutes ago. His hand has found the back of your head again and he's just holding it there, thumb tracing slow shapes you don't think he's aware of, his heartbeat slowing under your cheek from a sprint to a walk to something steady.

"You okay," he murmurs into your hair. The voice has gone soft and low, the post-disaster voice, the one that comes out after the engine cools.

"Mm."

"You went somewhere at the end there."

"I did."

"Good somewhere?"

"Very good somewhere."

He's quiet for a second, and you can feel him deciding whether to make a joke, and you can feel him choose not to, which is its own small miracle.

"I think I had the appeal backwards the whole time," he says instead, slow, working it out the way he works everything out, sideways and out loud. "I kept thinking the still part was the experiment and the moving part was the reward. But it's not two things. It's the same thing. The staying still is just. It's trust, right. It's me sitting here doing nothing useful and you letting me, and neither of us going anywhere." A pause. "That's the whole experiment. That's all it ever was. Everything else was just me being a shark about it."

You lift your head to look at him, because that is dangerously close to him being cleanly self-aware, and you want to see it before it evaporates.

It evaporates. He sees you looking and the grin comes back, sheepish, reflexive, the shutter coming down over something he showed you for exactly one second.

"Don't write that down," he says. "That one's not for the record."

"Too late."

"You can't publish that, it's not peer reviewed."

"I'm publishing it everywhere."

"Devastating," he says happily, and pulls you back down against his chest, and you let him.

After, much after, when the experiment has reached its actual conclusion and you are both a boneless tangle on the couch with the good blanket half on the floor and his glasses somewhere that is going to be a problem to find later, he is quiet again.

Genuinely quiet. The rare kind. The kind that means he's run out, fully, that the engine has finally idled all the way down.

You give it eleven seconds.

You count.

At twelve, predictably, gloriously, he stirs against you, and you feel him take a breath to say something, and you brace for it.

"So in conclusion," Ryland Grace says, to the ceiling, with the deep satisfaction of a man filing a final report, "the appeal is real, the methodology was sound, and I think for the next round we should isolate some additional variables."

You don't even open your eyes.

"Go to sleep, Ryland."

"I'm just saying. For science."

"Sleep."

He goes quiet. He lasts almost thirty seconds this time.

It's a personal best, and you tell him so, and he's so pleased about it that he forgets to keep talking, which is how you finally, both of you, reach equilibrium.

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