The spike of hot desire from Zidanya running her hands up my thigh doesn’t have time to dim before my lips are on hers, foot swinging the door to her room shut behind us.

My hands explore what my eyes had neglected all evening, and I pull back from the kiss slightly short on breath and with a fresh and roving eye. She poses, a smirk on her lips and her hips cocked out to the side, hands high in a fists-together stretch; up, left, right, and then in a slow circle, barely brushing against me, and I step in to kiss her again, lacing a hand in her hair while the other slips around her waist.

“That,” I say between kisses, lips millimeters from hers, “is motion fit to turn a spark into a blaze.”

“I’m sure I don’t understand what the Magelord might mean,” she breathes, and then my lips are on hers again, interrupting her.

It’s amazingly distracting, kissing Zidanya. Her lips are soft and warm, only a little broader than mine and moving against them in time with the slow motion of her body against mine. My tongue brushes them, and I feel the kiss change and deepen as she lets me part her lips, swaying as though she’s going to fall.

“Is that how you want to play this?” I murmur the words as I kiss my way down her jawline to her neck, tracing circles in the hollow near her collarbone, one word per kiss in the trail, one word for each time I feel her shift against me to wordlessly say she wants more. “Because if so, we need to talk first.”

She stiffens a little, pulling a half-step away from me. “If it’s my consent you have concerns of, I might remind you—”

“Zidanya, you could break me.” I carefully don’t laugh at her, because I think I’ve actually offended her. I run my hands along the muscles of her arm, instead, marveling at how I could possibly not have noticed the tight, sleeveless leather she’s been dressed in all evening. Sure, it’s not particularly revealing of skin, but it leaves absolutely no doubt as to both the glorious, nearly exaggerated curves of her body and the tense muscle underneath. “Physically and magically, sure, but I haven’t forgotten that you said you could break our bond if you wanted to. You probably know enough soul magic to ream me hollow there, too.”

That gets a snicker from her, which I hadn’t intended and which confuses me for a moment until I either remember or realize, it’s become hard to tell the difference due to Omniglot, the variety of meanings of the word I’d used. I kiss her, acting to cover my embarrassment, and though she kisses me back she dances back towards the bed at the same time, keeping it light and short even as I step forwards to follow her.

“I admit,” she says, “to some ignorance, then. Is my desire unclear? You showed no hesitation to take your pleasure of me and to provoke in me what you pleased those days ago, when last we shared a bed. And,” she adds with a smirk, “the shower afterwards.”

“It’s my ignorance that’s the point.” She sways to the side as I step in towards her, deftly stepping over my foot and making as if to turn and walk down the side of the bed. I lift my foot at just the right moment, only possible because of how affectedly slow she’s moving, and she overbalances just enough for me to guide her in a descent onto the bed instead. “I heard Lily handled some needs of yours that I didn’t even think to ask about, you know?”

“Ah.”

She tilts her head up slightly, and I take her up on the invitation, leaning onto my elbows with her arms under mine. Her lips part in a clear message of desire, but I just savor the taste of her lips for a long moment, one hand sliding back down the side of her head to cup her face at the jaw and feel the muscles shift as we kiss.

“What do you want from me, Zidanya? I don’t like the guessing games, you know that. Last time we did this it was… a scenario, it’s different.” I break the kiss to ask the question, and when she curls up and forwards in a remarkably powerful crunch to try to kiss me again, I pin her shoulder with a forearm. She growls in frustration, but she’s smiling, so I think that was right.

“Dominance,” she says eventually, giving up on the attempt. She stretches, instead, arching her back and drawing my eye to the unbelievable way the leather highlights every curve of her body. “Magelord, you overcomplicate the matter. Let me provoke in you some manner of passion, and show it without reservation. Be overcome, and use me to fulfill it.”

“Just that?” My hands start under her knees, slowly sliding up her thighs to her ass, and then back up towards her knees as I push her legs up. I step in and pull her towards me, and her eyes half close as her knees come to rest on my shoulders and my hands slide their way down the insides of her thighs towards her belly. “No boundaries, no preferences, just that?”

“Never speak of leaving me here.” The words come out of her in a rush, followed by a pause, as though she hadn’t intended to say them. “Bleed me, bind me, break me, fuck me however you wish, and in all that time, never—”

I kiss her, hard and with every bit of passion I can muster. My hands shift past her breasts to cup her head between them, my shoulders press her legs into her sides, and I part her resisting lips with my tongue roughly.

“Never,” I say softly. “I’d never.”

“Then… that.” There’s a wildness in her eyes, and it visibly takes her a moment to gather just those two slow words, punctuated by slow motions of her hips against mine, rubbing against the hardness underneath my pants. “That.”

I nod and kiss her again, mentally rifling through scenarios, stories, encounters, and fantasies alike. It’s almost like a moment of guided meditation, my hands sliding down from her face—ah, note the way that she shivers as my fingers brush against her cheek and jaw, the way she leans into first the one and then the other as they pass—and down past her shoulders to her breasts.

“Up,” I say softly, breaking the kiss. She looks at me as though with confusion, exaggerated to the point where it has to be her playing a role, and I smirk at her a little unsteadily. “Up,” I repeat, “and strip. Don’t get too distracted.”

There’s practicality in my demand, since I have no idea how to take her clothes off, but also it might serve well to define the scene, that thin space between need and desire and distance. Zidanya undoes a series of clever little hooks in a diagonal arc across her side that turn out to hold the shirt tight across her body while I run my hands slowly up her inner thighs and trace wide spirals up her ass; she fumbles three out of the seven hooks before finally getting them all and pulling her shirt over her head. Her shift follows with commendable alacrity, and my hands travel upwards to her waist while she struggles with her pants.

With almost any other partner, I’d be focusing on her reactions and trying to judge where my hands should go, how long and how firmly, by how she moves in response, integrating that into our negotiations and what I know of her history or our history and what we agreed on. With Zidanya, because of what she’d said, I instead pay attention mostly to how she feels under my fingers, how the skin at the base of her neck reacts to my mouth, my tongue, a nip of my teeth. I hear her moaning as I leave a trail of white, bloodless imprints on the light brown of her shoulders, and my hands cup the smooth, heavy softness of her breasts as my fingers revel in the stiffness of her nipples, twisting ungently and feeling her shudder against me.

She gets her pants off eventually, and her hands shake as she unties the drawstring on the whisper-thin shorts-looking underpants she was wearing. They look like they should be drifting down to the ground when she lets go, but they drop with a soft, wet squelch instead, and I run my fingers up her now-bare thighs to enjoy the slickness at their top and the way she squirms as I so delicately run the pad of my forefinger along those folds from high to low.

I want her. I want her too badly to tease her much longer; I want her enough that I fumble my own clothes as I strip myself out of them, giving Zidanya a chance to drop onto her knees and turn around to help with my pants, arms crossed under her breasts to press them together and up towards me. I step towards her as I step out of them, leaving them pooled on the floor behind me, hands reaching out to cup her face. She leans in towards me, breath catching in her throat as I stroke a circle from her cheekbones to her jaw and then along them and breath catching in my throat at how beautiful she is, and I bend down to kiss her, hands tightening on her jaw as I tilt her up to me.

It’s a long kiss, and somehow winds up being oddly gentle for all of its intense hunger. There’s something sublime about the moment that I know I’ll never be able to pin down and might never recreate, and it doesn’t end as I break the kiss and she lowers her head to nuzzle against the palm of my hand. My other hand twists in the roots of her hair, less gently than I’d planned, and she looks up at me, eyes flashing, as she shudders.

Unprompted, she bends down to run her tongue up the shaft of my cock to its head, gently circling it as my breath catches again. There’s smug satisfaction in the set of her face at that, and she travels back down and around and back up again, fingers coming up along the inside of my thighs to lightly explore. She presses a little bit harder as she takes me into her mouth, and my knees buckle under me as her fingers find something, something that has my brain short out and my legs almost slide out to the side.

I pull her up by her hair instead, bracing myself against the bed. She’s smirking for some reason when I kiss her, kiss the smugness off her face and then the surprise that I don’t understand, kiss her to reestablish that dominance that she wanted from me and that she’d so easily plucked out of my hands.

It’s almost aggravating. It is aggravating, that she so blithely expects me to read her whims and bring her what she wants without any work on her part, that she then uses the absurd skill of her hands and mouth to render me unable to deliver it regardless, and that’s wildly unfair of me but I ride the emotion hard enough to push her onto the bed. She sprawls inelegantly onto her back and I grab her ankles with just as little grace, folding her knees into her chest and then using the weight of my body to hold them there.

I get about half of my length in for the first thrust before various bits of position get in the way. I shift, and shift her, and push her belly out of the way with one hand as I wrap the other around the back of her neck to grab a shoulder, and then I’m buried full-deep inside her.

My lips on hers, one hand groping her breast and the other bracing against her shoulder, I put everything I have into fucking her, slow and deep with our hip bones almost slamming into each other. The moment of aggravation is gone, and all that’s left behind is desire and pleasure and just enough awareness to keep shifting as our exertions move us relative to each other, until even that is lost to me and I arch against her, legs locked tight and face buried in her neck.

She wraps arms and legs around me, afterwards, pulling my head down to rest on her breasts. I open my mouth to say something, I’m not sure what, probably thank you or stars, that was good, and she shakes her head wordlessly and taps a finger against my lips.

I nestle into her in the quiet, instead, listening to her heartbeat as it slows, and fall asleep not long after she does.