Crossroads
Requested by Anonymous: my take on the events surrounding 19x13
A multi-part story: foreplay in the first degree, smut in the second, and feels in the third
Table of Contents
Part II: Origami
The vulgar, animalistic twist and clench of impatience tore at his skin, threatening to breach the boundaries of decency and virtue within which it had been forcibly enclosed by the sheer fucking power of his will.
He watched you slide into the back of the town car in one smooth motion, unreservedly; the brazen push of you into the easy yield of darkness a duplicitous suggestion of erotic debauchery and grace. In turn, he chased you --letting himself sink, unopposed, into the intricate folds of your material show of wealth and power, letting himself be pulled further into your body by the hook of your bare ankle around his calf, letting the ferine primitiveness of his desire overtake him, at last.
“Harrison? ‘Round the park, please.”
“Yes, ma’am.”
It took every ounce of his self-restraint to face forward, and to continue doing so as he felt the trail of your daring fingers take an unnecessary detour by the way of his belt to the panel, in full view of your driver. But he had to wait, and wait-- wait until you’ve raised the partition to cleave the world into halves of indecent obscenity and lawful chastity, wait until the engine’s sudden roar beneath his thighs synchronized with that of the untamed brute’s within his chest, and wait until your car began defiling the streets of New York City with its forward glide.
Only then, did he slowly turn his head toward you to drink you in, a potent cocktail of promise and peril that he selfishly, triumphantly savoured, without having to share the sight of you with anyone else.
“‘Round the park?” He asked, sotto voce, his calm a stark contrast to the madness lurking on the edge of his mind.
“To see the trim of the foliage at night, counselor,” you teased quietly.
Coy and daring, you bared your neck to him. On anyone else, the very gesture would’ve spelled submission, but on you, it was a paradoxical cipher of challenge and condescension, thrown into sharp relief by the low purr of luxury upon which you were reclined. He was wearing at least thirteen thousand dollars from head to toe; yet, one blink from you tugged the threads of his handmade suit loose, and another unraveled the rich swaths of cloths, till all that remained was a poor, Cuban boy at the red light crossing of Bronx and Cambridge, of defiance and inadequacy.
But he didn’t feel cold. “Truly?” He murmured, half-swaddled in the heat of your eyes and the comfort of unmocked candor. “A woman with an eye for the visual arts.”
Maybe he ought to feel more disquieted at being seen through with such clarity. But the further your car carried him away from the imminent threat that the fissured pillars of his professional integrity posed, and further away from the chaos of a thousand voices decrying every breath he drew, the quieter his mind.
For the first time in years since he translated his life from Brooklyn to Manhattan, he had no use for pretense. And he wanted you to drop yours.
“Clearly,” you cocked an eyebrow at him meaningfully, lancing the sharp consonants with a smile full of self-congratulation and flattery.
Something clawed at his throat --he felt such a primal urgency to see you, for reciprocity--
He wanted to bite down on you and consume the whole of you, starting with the traitorous throb at the base of your neck that he could discern, clearly, under the slanted ribbons of street lights dimmed by the tacit tint of the backseat windows. The rabbit speed of your heart betrayed your semblance of composure, and he barely managed to swallow down the savage pleasure rising within him to meet the only truth that your body dared disclosing.
He wanted to bite down on you and take possession of your unwavering, unfaltering self-assuredness --for his own had been lost to time, acquaintances, and circumstances. This was a yearning so strong that it physically propelled him into the cloud of your perfume, each breath of which made his mouth water.
He wanted to bite down on you and consume the whole of you, to be with you, in you, outside you. He wanted undisputed ownership of your pleasure and his; he wanted it backdated and filed yesterday.
It’s a good thing he’d excelled at Mergers and Acquisition at Harvard Law.
The hem of your dress ran through his fingers like holy water, blessing him with the warmth of your skin, of your eyes. Spurred on by the turn of your head into his, he palmed your thighs open and, one thumb on the outer edge of your pussy and one thumb on the line of your jaw, he leaned in to do what he wanted to do: bite down on your neck.
A breathy moan erupted out of you in response, half-pain, half-pleasure; the sound piercing through the layers of silence and fabrics between him and you, stroking his ego and cock with equal pressure. The rapid course of your blood writhed beneath the delicate skin of your neck, and he languidly traced your pulse with the tip of his tongue, setting the proprietary nicks of his teeth there with a swipe of glaze.
You tasted faint, sweet, with a bold hint of familiarity, like an ever elusive truth dancing out of his reach. And your laugh: lazy, an open clause of late Sunday mornings pelted with sunlight and riddled with loopholes worth a dozen double-takes. He followed it with his lips to the end of its line, crossing his teeth with the shell of your ear, and dotting his eyes with the shifting gleam of your hair.
“Clearly, your taste is as exquisite as mine,” he whispered in your ear before tonguing your earring aside in favour of your flesh, his short exhales warming your cheek.
Unable to stifle a gasp, you turned your head toward him to replace the air you had lost, between his finger and his tongue, with the air he had displaced from his lungs, and momentarily found yourself nose to nose with him.
His eyes flickered down to your parted lips.
Time stretched between you, morphing into a heated aligot, caught in the turn of the fork in the road.
And then, abruptly, it broke, its loose end swinging with the tail lights of the car.
Frustration whiplashed into your eyes. “So, are you gonna give me a taste, as promised, or do I have to wait until the court inevitably disappoints you a little more for you to indulge me?” You breathed, smile sharp, and tongue sharper, your words lancing him through mercilessly.
“Why wait when you can address the court directly? Oh, wait-- that’s right, you can’t,” he mocked, flipping the bird against the seam of your pussy with one hand. His motion made your thighs jerk, closing on his wrist in a spasmic hold reminiscent of the tight, wet heat of a woman’s sex as he first breaches her.
But while the hitch of your breath ruled in favour of his motion, your glare disputed it.
Weaved in sadomasochistic cruelty, your words twisted with his to hang in the narrow space between your bodies, whispering ugly truths in the allusive night, taunting the bowstring of egos that neither of you had undrawn in defense --for what good was an unstrung bow when offense was intended?
Your back arched and tensed under his fingers.
“Even if you could,” he continued, his need to bait you into release outweighing his self-preservation, “what’s to say that you would have any judicial merit?”
Oh, did he love to see you snap.
Before he could blink twice, you had steadied yourself on a handful of his shoulders and had thrown a leg across his lap to straddle him, your movements lightning quick and fluent in seduction. “That’s your expert opinion, Mr. Barba? When have you had the time to cultivate your expertise-- in between taking calls from the Office of Self-Doubt and meetings with the District Anxiety?”
“That’s all you’ve got?” He ground out as you ground down on his lap. “How… Vanilla.”
“And that’s all you’ve got?” You taunted, pointedly drawing down the zipper of his trousers to outline his half-hard cock underneath. “How vanilla.”
The sharp retort on the tip of his tongue died with half of his brain as you scratched a single fingernail along the underside of him through his boxer briefs.
“Give me a taste, counselor,” you continued lowly, rubbing your knuckle against the swell of his rapidly dampening head as his hands flew up the sides of your thighs to hold you still. “C’mon. Give me a taste, show me what you really taste like, Mr. Barba. C’mon, show me.”
The breath in his throat suddenly arrested, shackled by the five year old phantom of his own belt in Adam Caine’s hands: his very first case with SVU. He’d taunted the defendant on the stand in the exact same tone, with almost the exact same words-- tell me how you like it, Mr. Caine, come on, show me-- with his own belt looped around his neck, the cold buckle pressed into the nape of his neck, and the loose tip in a rapist’s grip. He’d gotten choked in open court for his efforts, tasting the bitterness of the coffee he’d downed half an hour prior in the back of his tongue; and wasn’t that just a faithful foretaste of his time with SVU?
Why didn’t he take that as an omen? The leather noose, threatening the integrity of his physical and professional selves. The eyes in the gallery, watching on, with growing disbelief, judgement, and disapproval as the consequences of his increasingly questionable occupational decisions played out in front of their eyes. And then the hand, a disembodied menace: merciless, reckless, with a mind and an agenda of its own.
If only he’d known; he would’ve withdrawn from SVU as quickly as the red imprint of the belt upon his neck. Here he was, then --five years later, having given up chunks of himself in sacrifice to uphold ill-conceived ideals, trying to take back his sense of self by taking you, a lobbyist, who seemed to have what he lacked in spades, despite the games of moral subjugation to which you had a daily subscription.
The car circled back around the park to the Upper East, bringing his career up short and your hand to his jaw. He tilted his head up, catching you as you flited your eyes up from the curve of his lips to meet his gaze. Your quick, shallow breath fanned across the bridge of his nose, wanting, desiring. It would cost only a shred of his restraint to lean up and kiss you, to drink decorum and poise from your lips. Or to take you, to rip away the virtue in which you had clothed yourself, just to see whether it was as corruptible and flimsy as his own, and whether you were just as lonely and vulnerable without it as he’d previously surmised.
Your lashes effloresced the top of your flushed cheeks as they fluttered --it would only cost a shred of his restraint to brush his lips against yours, and he swallowed against the rising urge to consume you, because oh, did he want.
A tearing sound ripped through the air, and he suddenly found himself knuckles deep in the wet heat of you, eliciting a surprised gasp and a reflexive clench around his fingers. Belatedly, he came to the realization that, in the physical exercise of his restraint, he had split apart a fortuitous dyad with his digits: the lace of your panties, and you.
He might not know exactly who he was anymore, after five years spent in the concrete jungle, but of this he remained sure: he was nothing if not opportunistic.
Without further delay, he surged up, letting your pussy suck an additional inch forward. Your knees flailed on either sides of his hips, but he had the back of your neck in a firm grip, steadying your body in his lap. He beckoned your pleasure with a curl of his knuckles deep in your pussy and a press of his thumb against your clit.
You panted as he began fucking you relentlessly, pinned to his lap, the first syllable of his name threatening to roll off the tip of your tongue, and the last, corralled at the back of your throat. He flicked his wrist, the wet click of your pussy lips as they dragged against his skin filthily loud, and he could not help but wonder if that was what you’d sound like, stretched open and sliding down on the length of his cock.
Your nails had long laid waste to his suit jacket as they grappled for purchase upon his biceps and collar with increasing desperation, but he hungered not for composure --he hungered for release. He hungered for it so much, with such intensity, that he could almost taste it for how close it was, for how close you were to achieving it, if the quivering around his fingers were any indication, and for how close he was to be the blessed with it. You were freedom, you were complete, and whole; he wanted to be imbued with it, with you. If you’d only--
“Rafael--”
You came, silently, biting through your lip with wide, doe-like eyes, as if caught in the headlights of a hundred luminous headlights.
The back of the car was dim, but he needn’t see all of you to visualize the peak of your pleasure. You were so very responsive in his hands, knees digging into the leather bench, lewdly rocking your hips into each of his thrust, your wetness rolling down his wrist, feminine moans unfurling around mouthfuls of his first name. He allowed your neck to loll back into the palm of his hands, to lay bare its long column for his viewing pleasure. The sight of you, free at last, almost made him tumble over the edge, untouched.
For this --this was the capitulation he wanted from you, the unabashed exposure of your true self: the unravelling of an intricate origami, the thousand folds of your thousand selves construed by your careful hand and undone by his.
The back of the car was dim, but his eyes were burning, assailed by the brightness of your face and the sheen of your skin. You shone and glowed: a small sun cruising at fifty miles per hour along Fifth Avenue. And suddenly, he was too hot, too close--
Hubris had lifted Icarus’s wings and greed had carried him too close to the sun.
He could feel the hot sting of wax drip down his spine, as the first layers of his self-hatred began to melt, scattering the loosened ends of doubt and disquietude that feathered the scaffold of his psyche.
Your eyes: an unguarded, vast expanse of maelstrom in which he could easily drown.
There was no escape, no juste milieu --for you were both the sun and the sea, a double threat of nature against avarice and mediocrity.
In the quiescence of the night, nobody would bear witness to his fall.
Nobody would hear him fill his lungs with you.
Author’s Notes
hi this is christine
my anaconda don’t want none of my life & school right now cause it hasn’t got no buns
oh. my. god. look at how fucked i am for endocrinology
so part 1 was foreplay. part 2 to ?? is gonna be straight up smut more or less and they’ll pillowtalk their way into a kind of relationship
stay tuned ;) i’m gonna tackle my other requests while working on part 3
special thanks to @writefasttalkevenfaster and @8cetera for the pre-reads and for your rotten tomato reviews i really appreciate it my babes. @mrsrafaelbarba: surpriseeee!
(header img credit x)