‧𓍢ִ໋ ׂ𓈒 ⋆ ۪ Willing Bodies ‧𓍢ִ໋ ׂ 𓈒⋆ ۪
🕰️ Pairing: Possessed!Ed Warren x Possessed!Female!Reader
🕰️ Word count: 6.6k
<- Part 1 | Part 3 ->
Plot Summary: Things have been notably awkward between you and Ed since your encounter in the basement three days ago. The entity continues to torment you with visions of him, and you begin to be unable to tell the difference between what you feel and what the entity wants you to feel. When the entity locks you in the guest room, Ed quickly comes to your rescue. Turns out the two of you just played right into it’s hand once again.
Warnings: NSFW, minors DNI, dub-con, smut and angst and horror in one, body horror/cervix manipulation, masturbation, cheating, fear, guilt, kind of possession, animalistic wanting, impregnation, mating imagery, an entity is controlling how you feel, unprotected P in V, creampie, the demon is trying to make Ed get you pregnant, almost more angst than smut
His hands claw your waist.
You can feel the pressure of each finger, his grip tightening as he walks you backward and your shoulder blades meet the wall. His eyes are dark, the pupils swallowing the color, and he is looking at you wide-eyed and wanting, the careful man burned entirely away.
“Ed-” Your lips part to make room for his name, jaw slack.
His mouth finds your throat. His hands slide upward beneath your shirt, palms flat against your ribs, and the contact lights every nerve instantly. You arch into him. His lips drag up your neck, the corner of your mouth, and when he finally kisses you it is deep and hard and his hands are pulling you closer by the waist.
You press into him, heat pooling low in your belly, his name the only thing in your head, his hands the only thing on your skin, and the wanting crests and builds and—
Your husband shifts in bed beside you.
A small sound, half-conscious, his shoulder rolling toward you under the sheets. It’s warm and solid against yours, the familiar darkness of your shared bedroom snapping back into place around you.
Your hand immediately stills. Heat is pooling in your ears, rapid breath is the only sound. You lie rigid, pulse hammering in your throat, Ed’s eyes still burning behind yours.
Scanning him, you watch and wait for his breathing to even back out. As soon as you’re certain he’s under again your hand is back moving, already slick, with Ed’s name threatening to escape your lips.
It’s three in the morning. The same time you’ve been waking every night since the Warren’s came into your house.
Once you finish, you ease out from under the sheets and find your robe, padding out into the hallway as you pull the door closed behind you with both hands so the latch doesn’t click.
The house is still and soundless. It has been that way since you were pulled into the basement. That was seven, maybe eight days ago now. You weren’t quite sure. The silence should be a relief but it is instead its own category of dread. Three weeks of books hitting the floor and crucifixes swinging off the mantle and that deep animal throbbing below your navel, and then: nothing. It was like the entity got what it wanted and was now settled in to wait.
You go to the kitchen. The metal faucet is cool to your fingertips as you fill the kettle. Slumping against the counter while it heats, you look at the basement door. The now familiar electrical tape is over the bolt and there’s the salt line along the threshold. All preventative measures added since that day. Your mind wanders to his hands on the workbench edge, knuckles white, his body shaking with the effort of holding himself upright. You think about his eyes after, blue again, conscious again. The man of God who could never want you unless he’s possessed.
You didn’t get much sleep before the morning dawn broke through the curtains, casting its usual golden haze across the bedroom walls. You lay there and watched it spread across the ceiling until your husband’s alarm pulled him out of bed and gave you a reason to follow.
The nutty smell of coffee permeates your senses before you make it to the kitchen.
Lorraine is already up.
“Morning.” Lorraine looks up from the table with a smile that reaches her eyes. Warm. Like usual. Something in your chest contracts, pulled tight and throat dry, like a string plucked. “I made a full pot. I hope that’s alright.”
“More than.” You reach past her for a mug, keeping your movements easy, casual.
She nods agreeably and takes a sip of her coffee. The quiet between you is comfortable on her side, but a live wire on yours. She has such kind eyes. The kind that swell when witnessing the perspective of others. The perceptive kind. You can’t help but think she is a woman who deserves far better than what is sitting across from her.
The thump of footsteps on the stairs tightens your stomach before you can fully register the sound, let alone who it’s coming from. You stare into your mug as a flush prickles your ears.
Out of the corner of your eye, you watch as Ed appears in the doorway. Dressed, his notes already under his arm. His eyes find Lorraine first, with a smile, then you.
He crosses to her and sets his hand briefly on her shoulder as he passes and Lorraine tips her head slightly toward it without looking up from her notes.
You look away. Actually this time. Something about watching them together feels like pressing on a bruise.
“Morning,” he says. His voice is level.
“Morning,” you say. Yours is too.
The past week or so you’ve been doing your best to make sure there is always a doorway, a hallway, a husband or a Lorraine between you and the problem of Ed Warren. But today he’s standing with his sleeves rolled to the elbow, reading his notes casually, as though he has nothing looming on his conscience.
You have plenty on yours.
He goes to the coffee pot and Lorraine begins talking about the EVP recordings from the night before. You watch through your lashes as the two of them fall into the comfortable rhythm of their working shorthand and you sit inside it forgotten, like you’re standing in the wrong room.
He crosses and sets his notes on the table: the same forearm, the same large hand flat against the wood like it was against your skin. The view of his strong fingers immediately conjures images of that night, and your body responds to the sight with a warmth low in your belly that makes you press your thighs together.
You wonder whether the wanting you feel when you look at him is partly yours or solely the entity’s.
Averting your eyes is like fighting a magnetic pull, but soon they brush over the familiar rough wood grain. The basement door has been sealed since it happened, and everyone had a part to play. Your husband had helped lay the salt lines, grateful to have something to do with his fear. Lorraine explained that the tape would let everyone know if something come in or out. But you? You had stood in the doorway and watched the back of Ed’s neck and thought about your fingers curling around it. You meditated on all the sins you committed until you were forced to leave the room.
Perhaps it was time to leave this room too. You set your mug down and excuse yourself, heading upstairs to begin the day’s work.
Before long, the house settles into its now usual rhythm. Lorraine’s audio equipment hums from the kitchen. The distant putter of your husband’s car disappears down the drive.
Laundry basket on the ground, fresh linen smell in the air. You lean over the bed, pulling the corner of the fitted sheet over the mattress in the guest room.
Creeeak.
You look up.
Thud.
The door shut.
The pillowcase bunches in your fists as you stare at the door.
Then the warmth starts.
Low, first. A simmer deep in your hips, spreading outward like bathwater filling a basin, slow and deliberate and immediately, horribly familiar. Your hand shoots below your navel, but the contact makes it worse. You yank your hand away as you would from the scalding iron of a stove. Press it against your thigh instead. A shallow panicked rhythm claws at your throat. Your body is already pulling ahead of your mind, blood moving south in a rapid current you can feel in your teeth.
No.
You cross to the door. The handle turns in your grip but the door won’t move, the metal of your wedding ring scratching against the knob. Hands shaking, you pull until your shoulder aches, until you are using both hands and your full weight and are rattling the door against the frame. A sound climbs your throat that you press your lips together to keep inside.
Footsteps in the hall. Pausing. Then the handle jerks from the other side.
“The door’s stuck.” Ed’s voice, clipped and controlled.
“I know.” Your heart is hammering against your ribs. “Ed, it’s in here. I can feel it.”
“I’m going to try the hinges.”
“Okay.”
The warmth slowly rises to heat, moving into your thighs now and creating a heaviness that makes your knees wobble. You sink to the floor, legs drawn up, pillowcase still twisted in your hands. You press your forehead to the painted wood grain and try to concentrate on anything other than the dull flames beginning to crackle beneath your skin.
From the other side comes the sound of Ed working at the hinges, the scrape of metal, the groan of the frame as he throws his weight against it, a grunt of effort. The door shudders and holds. He tries again, a low curse under his breath. A third attempt, harder, and then silence. Just his breathing on the other side, uneven now. And the deafening noiselessness of the house.
A ringing fills your ears.The noise of Ed slamming against the door mixes with the pressure, the undeniable suction of all sound.
You press the back of your hand to your mouth. The warmth climbs further and your eyes sting. You are furious at yourself for it: the stinging, the watering, the shaking hands. You are not going to cry through a door at Ed Warren.
“Still there?” A beat. “Talk to me.”
“I’m here.” You clear your throat. “I’m fine.”
Your face hardens. The night of the incident you had told your husband you were fine at the top of the stairs with his arms around you, Ed’s warmth still seeping down the inside of your thigh. The word costs you something each time you use it.
“How bad is it?”
“It’s starting,” you start. Talking through the entity's influence felt like your mind was wading through mud, or tar. Some thick and sticky all consuming substance. “I can tell it is. But it’s– it’s different this time.”
A pause. “Okay.” His voice is low and careful, adjusting his approach. “Okay. I’ve got you. I’m right here.”
Your lip quivers as you listen to his words. His kind words. God, why couldn’t this be just for you? You longed for his tender hands to hold you, not from the heat or the entity’s prodding, but to feel safe and loved.
Then the handle turns. This time it gives and Ed bursts into the room.
The moment he crosses the threshold, he stops. His eyes go to you on the floor first, your shaking, shriveling form. Then to the window, the door, the corners of the room. Knit brows. He is cataloguing. Reading it for evidence, for intent. Then, his eyes come back to yours.
“It’s here,” he says.
“Yes.”
The door slams shut behind him with a thud.
You both stare at it for a moment.
The door, just an ordinary wooden door. Painted white. Gentle wood gain. It would look entirely unassuming on its own. Yet, you could almost see… you could feel the entity’s claws scratching against it. Locking it.
Ed crosses his arms and you watch his hands grip his own biceps, his forehead creasing, his shoulders tight. Working at something in himself. His throat moves, voice hoarse. “We should sit down. On opposite sides of the room. And we should wait it out.”
“Okay.”
You watch as he crosses and sits against the wall at the farthest point opposite you, his forearms on his knees. The heat in your belly is pressure now, a need that has moved past want: mate, now, him. A pulse between your thighs with each heartbeat, rhythmic and insistent, and beneath it the specific, devastating awareness that you want him to put a child in you. The thought burrows through your skull, chipping away at the barrier between conscious and subconscious. The entity has your whole body arranged around its truth.
You watch him resist. The rigid shoulders, the careful breath, staring at the fixed point on the wall above your head.
“Ed… I need to ask you something.”
“Go ahead.”
You thought you knew the answer, given the sight you were witnessing. But despite your best efforts, you needed to hear it from him.
Your face is hot, your hands still shaking. “Are you feeling it? What it’s doing. Are you feeling it too, or is it only—” Your throat closes around the rest.
Silence. Long enough that your stomach drops.
“Ed?”
“Yes.” The word comes out carefully. “Yeah. I’m feeling it.”
The relief and the horror arrive at the same moment. You press your forehead to your knees. “I thought I was — I was afraid it was only me. I am afraid—” You stop. More heat, but this time from embarrassment and a twinge of rage. Your voice has gone unsteady and you hate it.
“You’re not alone in this.” His voice is low and even. “You’re not losing your mind. You’re not weak. It just knows what it’s doing.”
“That,” you say, “is not as comforting as you think it is.”
He lets out a breath that might be a humorless laugh. “No. I don’t suppose it is.”
With a huff, you let your head roll back against the wall. You sit with your arms around your knees and try to concentrate on the texture of the floorboards, the afternoon light under the gap at the bottom of the door… the sound of his breathing. The throbbing in your hips is steady and patient and you are trying very hard not to think about his hands on your skin.
“Talk to me,” you say. “Just — keep talking.”
“About what?”
“Anything.”
He’s quiet for a moment.
“When Lorraine and I worked the Price case, there was a night I got locked in the barn. Whatever was in there with me, it worked the same way. Found the thing you were most afraid of and pressed on it until you couldn’t think straight.” A pause. “The only thing that helped was anchoring to something external. Try to find something: a place, a memory. Something that has nothing to do with this house.”
“How long were you in the barn?”
“Four hours.”
You squeeze your eyes shut as the warmth crests and you dig your nails into your palm. Then breathe out slowly through your nose. “I don’t think I have four hours in me.”
“You have more than you think. Stay with me. Don’t let it pull you under.”
“I’m trying.”
“I know.” He’s patient. Calm. Setting his own fears aside for the hope of helping you. “Close your eyes. Find somewhere else.”
You close your eyes and breathe out slowly once more. The beach. Salt air and cold water, the specific grey of the Atlantic in October—
Ed’s hands on your hips in the shallows, the water cold around your thighs and his chest warm against your back, his mouth at your ear, walking you deeper until the waves take your weight and he turns you around and—
Your eyes snap open. Your face is burning.
“It’s not working,” you whisper.
“Try something else. Someone. Your husband.”
You try. You reach for his face, his voice, the way he laughs at his own jokes before he finishes telling them. You try to build him in your mind the way he was on your wedding day, solid and familiar and–
Your mind gives you Ed instead. Your husband in the doorway, yes, but you are on the bed and Ed is above you and your husband is watching with his mouth agape and eyes helpless but doing nothing to stop it. The shame of it runs cold down your spine but turns to cinders as it reaches between your thighs.
You make a sound that is mostly air and press your fist hard against your mouth.
“What happened?” Ed’s voice, sharp.
“It won’t let me.” The words come out unsteady. “Every time I reach for something it—” You shake your head. “It takes it. It turns it into—”
He is silent. You watch his eyes as they watch you. A certain sadness and a certain knowing behind them.
“Is it doing the same to you?”
A long pause. His eyes go to the wall. “Yes.”
Something about hearing him admit it undoes a knot in your chest and pulls a different one tighter.
“Ed.” Your voice comes out very small. “I’m scared.”
Then his eyes are back on you. They’re damp and wide, his usual professional distance dropping. “I know. Me too.”
The heat surges in you like a change in the wind causing a bonfire’s flames to lick your skin. Your fingers curl against the floorboards. Across the room his fingers are leaving white prints against his own biceps, holding on, and you understand that you are both going through the same thing.
“What do we do?” Your pleading eyes find his.
“We hold on as long as we can.”
The answer barely lands before the heat spikes again. A sudden, sharp, a white-hot flare deep in your womb pulls a sound out of you before you can stop it. The small yelp escapes your lips and white crests at the peaks of your knuckles as you dig your nails into your legs.
Ed is on his feet before the sound finishes leaving your mouth.
“Hey–” He crosses the room and crouches in front of you, close enough that you can see the tension in his jaw, the muscles in his face pulled tight. It is the effort it costs him to be here, this close to you. His hands come up and stop short of touching you. Hovering. Careful. “Look at me. Stay with me.”
You look at him.
You look and then you realize. When you look at him, the heat surges, but underneath it is something else entirely: for once you realize it is your heart that swells. It swells with the grief of looking at something you cannot have.
“I can’t tell anymore,” you say. Your voice comes out very small, but fraying on the edges like worn lace. “What thoughts are mine and what it put there.”
His eyes soften. “I know.”
Was that pity? Sympathy?
“Do you?” The words arrive before you can stop them. “Because you have something to go back to. Someone. You know what’s yours.” You press your lips together. “I’m not sure I do anymore.”
He holds your gaze and something moves through his face that he doesn’t put into words. His hands, still hovering, drop slowly to his knees.
“That’s not—” He stops. Tries again. “It’s not as simple as that.”
You don’t ask him what he means. Partly because you are afraid of the answer, but mostly because the heat is continuing to build.
Ed feels it too. You watch it move through him. The slight shift in his posture, the breath that comes out less steady than the one before, the way his pupils expand and contract. Each time as a threat to swallow the beautiful blue.
“We should—” He stops, shaking his head and blinking. Tries again. “Opposite sides of the room. That’s what we said.”
“Yes.”
You watch as his eyes settle back to normal. He is fighting the entity’s control. Neither of you moves.
The afternoon light through the curtained window has made its usual shift to gold. Soon the cricket-song would fill the countryside, and the sun would slip below the horizon.
The entity chooses this moment.
It is not violent. Not the way it was in the basement. It does not possess you, doesn’t enter you, disney barrel down your throat. Instead It is slow and total, like water rising, filling every low place. It is guiding. The warmth in your pelvis deepens into pressure, your cervix softening incrementally, a slow involuntary yielding. Your eyes snap open and a sound escapes you before you can catch it.
Ed’s hands find your face and your mind goes blank.
A live round. An explosion. White vision. Ringing ears.
As soon as you moved into this house a few weeks ago, the entity tormented your body, poisoned your mind, and fought for your soul. It knew Ed would come long before you did. Each moment was part of his design, each leading up to the moment his palms cup now your face. You feel Ed go still. The same stillness moves through you, the kind that comes just before something gives way.
“We can’t.” His voice is already wrecked, but it brings your mind back. You can see him live and warm in front of you through the haze. “It wants this.”
“I know.”
“If we do this we’re giving it exactly what it—”
“I know, Ed.”
“Then why—” His voice breaks at the top. His hands tighten against you, and his eyes stay on yours, and the color in them is darkening again.
You look at him. At the careful man, the kind man who was here to help you. At the man who was risking his life by being in your home every day. The man who, in doing so, will lose his everything. His wife...
You think about Lorraine’s head tipping toward his touch this morning. You think about the way they move through a room together. Two people in synergy. Two people with the same goal… made for each other.
You think: He would never do this. Want me, choose me. Not really. Not without the entity’s hand on the back of his head.
The demon presses in from every wall. Nagging. Your hands find his wrists.
“Because I can’t stop it,” you say. “Can you?”
Something moves through his face, a long internal battle arriving at its conclusion, a subtle shift in his eyes, the slightest ease in his brow.
“God—” The word comes out like a prayer and a curse at once and his forehead drops to yours. “God forgive me. No.”
The air feels charged as his hands move to your shoulders, travel across your collarbone and up your neck until he is gently cupping your face with his hands once more. His mouth comes down on yours. Soft. Reverent.
The kiss is nothing like it was in the basement. The basement was collision. It was the two of you being used. Your bodies were simple instruments. This is slower. This is his hands gracing your face, your mouth, and yours finding his shirt, pressing a pleased hum against his lips.
He pulls back just far enough to look at you, cheeks flushed and breathing hard.
“This is a sin,” he whispers. You’re not quite sure if he is saying it to you or to himself.
“I know.”
“It’s different from last time,” he says against your mouth. “We don’t have the excuse of—”
He can’t finish. Instead his eyes, big and fully blue, are locked with yours. And yours are knowing, wanting, agreeing.
Willing.
His lips crash into yours. This time, your attention is drawn to the softness of his lips, but it is over once again before the rest of your realization can form. He stands and helps you up before his lips immediately return to yours. Then, he walks you backward toward the bed and lays you down carefully. His fingers gently trace your thigh as he pauses to look at you for a moment, and you recognize grief and longing fighting for the same space in his face.
He reaches back and pulls his sweater off. The white t-shirt underneath is worn thin, soft from washing, pulled tight across the breadth of his shoulders. His arms are what you noticed first about him when he came into your house six days ago. Yet the effect they have on you is even worse up close. They are the kind of arms that belong on a man who builds things, who carries things. He is solid in a way that provides comfort and stability, a steadiness that goes all the way through.
You reach up and press your palm flat against his sternum. Over his heart.
He looks down at your hand and something in his expression shifts.
Then his hands find your face. Large hands, careful hands, the same hands you watched wrapped around a coffee cup, steadying equipment, or thumbing through files. His thumb traces your cheekbone like he is learning it. Like he wants to remember it.
This is different. This is the moment you understand that something has changed. Not in the demon’s burning, which is still there, still steady and rising. Underneath it.
His mouth finds your throat, your collarbone, the soft place below your ear that makes your breath catch. You trace the line of his shoulder while he works at your buttons, his lips following the path his hands open.
Your breath is warm against him and you allow your hands to feel the rolling waves of muscle down his back.
As he gently helps you rid yourself of the shirt, his hands explore your back, quickly unclasping your bra and sliding the straps down your shoulders with his teeth. He takes a hardening nipple in his teeth as his hands grasp your hips, rolling you back and forth against him as his leg settles between your thighs. You helplessly buck against the contact, as his hands become attentive to your skirt, finding the zipper on the side and sliding it down, your panties down with it. The cold air hits your thighs and your shiver against him. Ed presses closer in answer, the warm solid weight of him against you, and you feel his heartbeat through the thin cotton of his shirt, going as hard and fast as yours.
He sits back and pulls the shirt over his head and you see him properly for the first time: the breadth of his chest, the small patch of hair at the center of it. You hardly get a chance to take it all in before he’s standing and pushing down his pants and boxers. Then all you can see is his cock. Hard and thick. With a delicious slight curve that you know would hit the spot deep inside you that you craved. These thoughts make you realize the entity is fighting for control again.
He crawls back onto the bed and takes your thighs in his hands, pulling them apart and finding you already slick. His breath releases in a long shudder.
When he settles between your legs, the demon takes this opportunity to deepen its hold. You feel it like a tide coming in, the heat becoming pressure, your cervix softening further to its design. Your hips tilt to follow its instruction and you brush yourself against the tip of Ed’s cock, a small whimper escaping your lips.
“I know,” he breathes against your throat. “I feel it too.”
He steadies himself and pushes into you slowly, all the way, allowing your body time to adjust. The fullness is staggering. Every nerve the entity has been priming lights at once, but underneath the burning is something gentler: the devastating intimacy of his forehead against yours and his eyes meeting yours and his body settled into you.
He begins to move and you rise to meet him, the two of you building an unhurried rhythm, your body savoring the push and drag of him inside of you. This is nothing like the time you spent together three nights ago. This time your hands are everywhere on him and his are on you and he watches your face while he moves, watching each expression cross it. This time, your bodies are willing.
“Look at me,” he asks, low.
You hold his gaze while he moves in and out of you. The gentle glow of his eyes, the golden sunset catching in his hair. It all captivates you. Your hand rests on his cheek, fingers combing his sideburn and into his hair. A soft hum passes through his lips and he leans into your touch, closing his eyes and kissing the base of your palm. He continues his pace, and the pressure builds and your hands pull him closer. Your fingers thread further naturally, your palm cradling the back of his head. You are not holding on. You are holding him. This has nothing to do with the effect the demon planted in you. This is you choosing where to put your hands and choosing to put them here, on him, gently.
Like a switch flipped, the primal pull in your belly tightens into something almost unbearable. Your brow knits together and tightens, the gentle hand in his hair now clutching and tugging. Your body is open and aching, hips tilting against your will, and underneath the want is imperative again, louder now, a drumbeat: fill me, keep me, make something permanent of this. Your hands clutch his hips and pull him into you and he makes a wrecked sound.
“I know what it wants,” he grits out.
A white-hot pulse clenches deep in your belly that wipes the softness clean out of you like a hand sweeping a table bare. The tenderness that was just there is gone, burned off.
“Do you?” The voice that comes out still belongs to you, but the heat crackling behind it isn’t. Your grip on him tightens further, your hips rolling against his in a slow grind that pulls a sound from him before he can stop it. “Then give it what it wants.”
His brows furrow but his hips keep moving. “That’s not you talking.”
You know he’s right. You pupils have consumed your eyes and your vision has gone slightly blurry. Yes, despite you searching for it, you cannot seem to find it within yourself to care.
“Tell me what it wants.” The words arrive dripping honey.
He looks away, brows set low over his eyes. A muscle works in his throat.
“Ed.” Your hips roll again and his breath comes apart. “Say it.”
“It wants—”
You wait. Rather, the entity waits through you, vast and tempting and without mercy.
“It wants me to put a child in you.” The words come out rough, but low like a whisper, a confession torn loose. “That’s what it’s been building toward since you moved here.” His pace quickens, the sound of skin slapping against skin fills the room. “That’s what it’s doing right now.”
“And you’re still here,” you taunt.
His eyes close and jaw goes slack, knuckles growing white with the grip he has on your hips and the force he is thrusting into you. “God help me. Yes.”
The want in you climbs past the point of managing. Suddenly you can see again. The fire still spreads through your body, but it releases your mind, the warmth spiking, your cervix contracting in long pulling waves that draw him deeper with each one. The only word leaving your lips is his name.
“Ed—”
“I’ve got you.” He knows you’ve returned to him. That you’re not the entity. But also that he has you on the edge. His thumb finds the place that makes your toes curl. “I’ve got you. Let go.”
You shatter around him with his name in your mouth and your nails in his shoulders and he works you through it, slowing when you shudder, deepening when your hips chase him, watching your face come apart and putting it back together with his hands.
As you come down from your high, your legs pull him closer. The deep instinctive pull is back, relentless, a need that has moved into something wordless and animal. You tip your hips up, changing the angle, and feel him seat deeper and groan into your hair.
He rolls his hips rather than drives, grinding deep on every stroke, and each time he bottoms out the pressure against your cervix is a specific, devastating bloom of sensation that radiates outward through your hips, your thighs, the base of your spine. Your body is bearing down, pulling him in, with a rhythmic involuntary clenching deep inside.
“God–,” he breathes against your throat. “God — I can feel you—”
“Don’t stop.” Your hips roll to meet him, urging him deeper, chasing the pressure at your cervix the way a bruise chases the press of a thumb. “Right there. Don’t stop.”
The clenching deepens. Each contraction draws him further in, your whole body reorienting around a single biological imperative. Your fingers dig into his lower back. He shudders and drives forward and you feel him nudge through, seated fully past the threshold, and the whine that leaves your mouth loud and pleading.
“I know,” he grits out, voice wrecked. His hips are working in slow circles now, grinding himself there and you can feel him brushing against your clit. “I know. I feel it. You’re pulling me in.”
Your body contracts around him again, hard, drawing him flush, and he makes a broken sound above you and loses his rhythm entirely.
“God.” The word tears out of him, desperate and ruined. “God, I’m sorry—”
He comes with his face pressed into your neck and your name on his lips, hips snapping forward and locking there, and you feel it immediately — the first pulse of him, thick and hot, shooting against your cervix in a rush that makes you gasp. Then the second, longer, a wave of heat flooding deep. His whole body shudders with each one and he grinds forward through them, working himself deeper with every pulse, and you feel the heavy warmth of him painting your walls, pooling at the neck of your womb, the pressure of it building as he empties in long ropes that don’t stop, that keep coming, that fill you past fullness until you feel the obscene heat of it pressing back outward with nowhere left to go.
Your cervix contracts around him, slow and rhythmic, milking each pulse. Drawing it in. Taking everything offered with a wet, demanding purpose to follow the oldest instruction written into female flesh.
Your name continues to spill from his lips as he slowly comes back to himself. He stays above you, breathing, his weight half on you and half on his forearms.
The room is still. The entity has receded, the pressure lifting like draining the bath, leaving behind only the two of you and what you’ve done and the cooling afternoon light through the curtained window.
You can feel the warmth of him seated deep, still pulsing faintly. Your hand is on his chest, over his heart, and you are counting his heartbeats while yours slows.
“Ed?”
“Yeah?”
“Look at me.”
He does. His wide eyes are that beautiful pale blue again. No threat of darkness. The golden hue streaming through the curtains catches his hair in angelic light. With one hand on his heart and the other in his hair, that doe-eyed expression he is making squeezes your heart. There is no heat in your legs. The entity is gone. Yet you’re in bed, holding him like a lover. Like someone you’re in love with.
You watch as his swelling expression quickly contorts and the full weight of what he’s done seeps into his face. The sun slips behind a cloud and the light turns cold. The man is coming back to himself, and what comes back is not relieved.
He looks at his own hand beside your face on the pillow. Then at you.
“I keep—” He stops. Tries again, hushed. “I told myself this wouldn’t happen again.”
You hold his gaze but say nothing. What could you even say? You didn’t even know how you felt about him.
“She deserves better than this.” He says it to you, or to himself, or to whatever is listening in the walls. “You both do.”
You turn your face toward the window where the light has gone amber and thin.
“What do we even do?”
“I don’t know.” He shakes his head, “I don’t have an answer for that.”
Downstairs, the front door opens. Your husband’s voice, cheerful and guileless, calling up the stairs to ask if anyone wants coffee.
Ed closes his eyes.
You watch his face while he does it. The lines deepen, something final behind them, the careful man reassembling himself piece by piece. When he opens his eyes again he is already partly gone, already building the distance back between you.
He eases back. The warmth of him leaving you in a slow rush, the evidence of what you’ve done seeping onto the sheets beneath you. He looks away.
Reaching down, he retrieves your blouse from where it landed and holds it out. The same gesture he performed the night in the basement. Then, he stands. Straightens his shirt. Runs a hand through his hair. At the door he pauses with his hand on the frame. His back to you.
He doesn’t say what you are both thinking: that it will come back again. That it knows what it is doing. That it got exactly what it came for, twice now, and it is patient enough to wait for a third. This incubus was hell-bent on whatever goal it had in mind, and it seemed determined to watch the two of you burn.
He leaves without looking back.
For a long moment you don’t move. You stare at the ceiling and listen to his footsteps on the stairs, to your husband’s voice brightening when he hears them, to the ordinary sounds of the kitchen below you while you lie here with the evidence of what you’ve done cooling on the sheets beneath you.
You have to get up. You know this. You have to get up and strip the bed you made with your own hands, the fresh sheets you smoothed flat not three hours ago. You ease yourself upright and the warmth of him runs freely, soaking into the cotton beneath you.
You pull the sheets off methodically. Corner by corner, the same hands that made this bed unmaking it, bundling the evidence into itself. Your throat is tight. You are very focused on the task. You are doing fine.
Then your husband laughs at something downstairs, a warm ordinary sound, and something in you simply gives way.
The pressure behind your sternum is so acute it bends you forward, sheets clutched to your chest, a sound rising in your throat that makes you wince. Your shoulders are shaking. You are on your knees on the stripped mattress and you cannot identify which grief is which: the guilt about your husband, the image of Lorraine’s kind eyes, the sickening devastation of watching Ed walk out of the room without looking back. It is all one thing. It has become one thing and you cannot separate it into pieces you might be able to manage.
You stay like that for a while. Shaking, quiet, your face pressed into the bundled sheets.
The ember below your navel pulses again. Hot. Devastating. Taunting.
It is the entity’s work, you tell yourself. All of it. The wanting, the warmth, the aching, trembling pain of watching him leave. The entity put it there and one day, when this is over, it will take it back.
You tell yourself this for a long time, the last shreds of afternoon light sinking and turning to gray.
Yet the ember. It has had Ed’s name on it since before the basement, since the first morning his knock came at your door, since before you knew his name.
You’re starting to think it always will.
By the time your husband calls your name up the stairs you have pressed the heels of your hands against your eyes and breathed enough to arrive at something that resembles stillness. Your voice comes out almost even.
“I’ll be right down.”
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