3. Maren #2
I want to push, badly, my whole chest going tight with wanting to know. I don’t, because one mystery at a time is a policy I’m holding to tonight, and there are enough things in this station already that are more than I planned for.
His heartbeat under my ear is steady—the kind of steady you stop tracking because it becomes just the sound of the room.
Like the stove. Like the storm. The ring is warm against my side.
His cock is hard against my back. The fire is going and the storm is going and the night is doing what nights do.
“I’ll ask again,” I say.
He says nothing.
I stop talking somewhere around the forty-minute mark—not from running out of things, just the words slowing down. The warmth does what warmth does to words eventually. His chest rises and falls. The fire crackles down toward coals.
His cock is still hard against the small of my back. The metal of it sits warm against my side. The storm is still going.
I’m fine.
I’m fine until I shift—small, just settling, just finding the part of him that’s warmest—and the shift presses me back against his cock, and his breath catches above me. Quiet. The first uneven thing I’ve heard out of him in two days.
I go still.
He goes still.
The room narrows down to the place where we’re touching.
I’ve spent two days not thinking about this, very deliberately.
The not-thinking is gone now. What’s left is the simple animal fact of a hard cock against my spine, his hand spread flat and warm across my stomach, the wanting I’ve been talking over since the storm came in.
I reach back. I don’t decide to. My hand finds his hip, then him, and my fingers close around his cock—and what I find isn’t what I expected.
A warmth, a give, soft over something very hard, the foreskin loose under my hand in a way I’ve read about and never once held.
I know the history. I know the era. I didn’t connect it to this room.
He makes a sound. Low. Bitten off.
I do it again, slower, learning him, the slide of skin over the hard length of him.
His hand fists in the blanket at my hip.
The cock ring is suddenly hot, not warm—full up, awake, the amber of it throwing light against the wall, and it occurs to me somewhere very far in the back of my mind that I now understand exactly why it’s called that, and I put the thought away for later.
“Maren,” he says. Rough. Like it’s costing him.
I turn over. My pussy is already aching for him, already wet—I can feel it, the want of it embarrassing, undeniable. I’m done being embarrassed about it.
He’s looking at me in the firelight, that unreadable face with something behind it now I can read fine.
He doesn’t ask. He waits—a thousand years of waiting in him, I’d believe it—until I put my mouth on his and pull him down over me.
My thighs are already open for him before I’ve decided to open them.
Slick. Wanting. My body two days ahead of the rest of me.
He covers me without putting his weight on me.
His hand goes between my thighs and finds me already wet, soaked from two days of his cock hard against my back, his hands on the wood, the way he reads the room like he built it.
He makes that sound again when he finds out how wet I’m.
Not smug. Just a man whose body answers honestly.
Two thick fingers push into my pussy and I make a sound with no words left in it at all.
His thumb finds my clit and I stop having opinions about anything.
He works me open slow, the same deliberate attention he gives the stove and the wall and the wrong map. I clench wet around his fingers. He goes deeper, his thumb keeping a steady pressure on my clit, and I come like that—fast and hard, his name in my throat, my hand fisted in the blanket.
Then he lines his cock up against my pussy and pushes in.
I stretch—fully, my body taking the long count of how much of him there is—and he stops when my breath hitches, his forehead against mine, waiting.
I tilt my hips. He drives the rest of the way in.
The ring presses warm against my clit where his thumb was and the fullness is too much and exactly right.
He moves in me and doesn’t stop. Doesn’t slow, doesn’t tip, doesn’t do any of the things a body is supposed to do past a certain point—no man has ever lasted with me the way he lasts now, and I stop counting somewhere in the middle of it because counting stops mattering—the metal at his base holding him right at the edge and refusing to let him fall over it, keeping him hard and deep and patient long after his body should have given out.
I stop expecting him to finish. I start wanting him to.
He fills me. He keeps filling me—when it finally breaks it isn’t small, it’s a flood, deep and warm, more of him than I know what to do with, and he doesn’t stop, doesn’t soften, the ring holding him hard while he grinds it into me, slow circles of his hips working his own release deeper instead of pulling back.
He fucks me in long unhurried strokes, each one grinding the warm metal against my clit, the heat of him building inside me with nowhere to go.
I come again somewhere in it, soaked, gripping his shoulders.
He says low Norse words against my hair that I don’t know and feel anyway.
When it tips it isn’t loud. He goes still—one held second—then breaks, the sound he makes lost in my hair. The flood comes warm and deep into my pussy, wave after wave while he shakes above me and the ring blazes between us. I hold on. It’s all I’ve got.
After, he doesn’t pull out. He gathers me back against his chest, his cock still seated deep, still hard in the warm aftermath, his arm a weight across my ribs and his mouth at the top of my head. The metal of him pulses slow against my side, settling.
“J?re,” he says again. Quieter this time. Almost gone.
I don’t ask. I’ll ask again. Tomorrow.
His cock is still in my pussy. The ring is still warm. The storm is still going. My whole body feels wrung out and lit up at the same time, and I have no idea what to do with that.
I’m fine.
The quality of the sleep is the thing.
I sleep well here—I chose this station because I sleep well here, because the sounds are mine and the dark is the right dark.
But this is different in kind. Like finding out a thing I’d been calling fine had a setting above fine that nobody told me about.
Like finding out adequate temperature and actually warm were not the same category.
I wake against him at six. Sometime in the night he slipped out of me, careful, without waking me; I’m tucked under his arm now and the blanket is over both of us and the fire is further along than it should be for an untended stove.
He’s awake. He tracks me when I sit up, steady.
I don’t know how long he’s been awake. Maybe all night.
Maybe not. He holds still the same way either way, so there’s no telling from looking at him.
We don’t talk about it. I’m not sure either of us has the category for it yet, and the stove needs wood, and the stove is a thing I know how to do. My body has other ideas—it keeps reminding me, low and warm, that something happened last night that I am absolutely not ready to name over breakfast.
“Morning,” I say.
He nods.
The protein bars taste the same as yesterday.
He eats his without comment. I’m choosing not to examine what that says about him versus me. I’m choosing not to examine a number of things this morning, starting with why I’m smiling into a protein bar like an idiot.