CW: smut

  I was there again.

  There was no lead-up. No sense of waking. Just heat already coiled low in my body, tight and insistent, the kind of pressure that made it hard to breathe. My skin prickled. My thighs pressed together without my meaning to. Something had reached far enough to pull me into focus, and I knew it was not my mind.

  Time did that to me now. It folded, jumped, restarted without warning, and sometimes it dropped me back into myself like this—already burning, already off-bance. I had learned not to trust sequence. Desire often came first, a blunt, overwhelming fact, and consciousness scrambled after it, trying to catch up.

  I could no longer tell which moments were real and which were fever-dreams stitched together. The wanting felt real either way.

  Maybe this was how my mind protected itself. By letting my body bear the brunt of it. By dulling everything else until only the need remained.

  I couldn't know it for a fact.

  I only knew that this moment felt different.

  The pressure did not scatter this time. It held.

  That alone made me cling to it.

  I looked down at the hand in my p. The weight of it.

  I knew it by its shape before anything else. The lines across the palm. The roughness at the base of the fingers. Callouses worn smooth by repetition. Familiar, in a way that bypassed memory and went straight to recognition.

  My senses were failing everywhere else.

  I couldn't tell where I was. Could not pce the bed beneath me beyond the dip of the mattress and the dampness of the bnket twisted around my legs. My skin felt cmmy, oversensitive, registering every point of contact as if it were the only thing that existed.

  His hand was easier to understand than the rest of the world.

  I didn't want to let go of it.

  Whatever else was slipping, that was not. I held onto it because the idea of losing it felt suddenly intolerable, like being dropped back into noise after finding signal.

  I lifted his hand without thinking, guiding it toward my face. It found its pce automatically, palm warm against my cheek, solid in a way nothing else was.

  I leaned into the touch.

  The thumb brushed over my lips, a slow, absent sweep that made something in me tighten and then surge forward all at once. Heat fred, no longer just static but direction. Want. Clean and unmistakable. The crity of it startled me—how quickly my body seized on the sensation and reached for more.

  I opened my mouth.

  The fingertip slid past my lips and I closed around it, relief cutting through me sharp enough to steal my breath. The contact steadied something frantic and aching, even as it fed it. I didn't try to resolve the contradiction. I only knew that I wanted to keep this, wanted him to stay exactly where he was.

  Don't let it stop.

  The thought surfaced fully formed, urgent and unguarded. I clung, pulling his hand closer, as if proximity itself were the answer. My awareness narrowed around the contact, the rest of the world falling away under the press of wanting.

  Then the rest of him arrived.

  Weight followed the hand, close enough that there was no separating one from the other. Heat. Presence. The sense of being met instead of reaching into empty space. I let myself be guided back, the mattress rising beneath my shoulders as if this were the only pce I could have ended up.

  His mouth found mine.

  I met him in kind.

  I kissed with the same need that had driven my hands, clinging to the coherence it brought, the way sensation finally lined up with intent. My body responded greedily, leaning into the contact, asking without words for more of this. More of whatever had made the noise recede.

  He pulled away just long enough to break the contact.

  The absence startled me. Cold rushed in where there had been heat, sharp enough that my hands followed him without conscious thought, reaching, grasping at empty air. I made a small, frustrated sound before I could stop myself.

  Fabric shifted. The tunic went over his head.

  Then the space closed.

  He came back down without the barrier between us, his skin warm against mine, close enough to make something inside me throb. He exhaled against my neck, a shaky sound he didn't try to hide. My breath caught.

  His mouth pressed mine once again.

  I met him with the same urgency that had been building since the moment he touched me. My hands slid over him, needing to feel more, to confirm what my body already knew. He was solid under my palms, his back broad and unyielding, his presence making the pull in me sharper, more insistent.

  His hands moved over me in response, firm and certain, tracing paths that made the heat fre brighter instead of settling. One slid up my side, from my waist to my ribs, his thumb brushing the underswell of my breast. The other hand fttened against the small of my back, pressing me tighter against him, erasing any st sliver of space between our bodies.

  Sensation yered on top of sensation until it crowded out everything else. I could feel how close I was to losing myself again.

  I didn't want to go back. The ache inside me had a direction now, a source. A hard, insistent pressure I could feel against my hip through the yers of his clothes.

  My hands slid down his chest, over the tensed ridges of his stomach. My fingers found the waistband of his trousers and rested there, briefly, clinging to the edge of that st barrier. The fabric was rough against my palms, but the heat beneath it was undeniable—trapped, straining and hard.

  I didn't think. I only needed the barrier gone. I fumbled with the cings, my fingers clumsy and desperate, until the knot gave way.

  He sprang free, hot and heavy against my wrist.

  His hips recoiled.

  It wasn't a rejection, but something in him flinched—a sudden, sharp intake of breath that I felt more than heard.

  I didn't let him retreat.

  The need in me was a cwing, hollow thing, and he was the only one who could fill it. I reached for him again, closing my fingers around the length of him. It pulsed with a life that made my own heartbeat stutter.

  I stroked him. He was thick in my hand, the skin impossibly soft over the rigid hardness beneath. I worked him from base to tip, my palm brushing the slick bead at the slit, using the wetness to ease the friction.

  His breath hitched against my mouth. The reaction was immediate—his hips jerking forward into my grasp, a low sound tearing from his throat that vibrated against my lips. It felt like power. It felt like the only kind of control I had left.

  I wanted more.

  I tried to line him up.

  The movement was awkward, uncoordinated. I lifted my hips, trying to guide him to where the ache lived. It was a blind, instinctive attempt to bridge the gap, to take him inside me before he could think better of it.

  He stopped me.

  His hand caught my hip, halting the frantic motion. For a moment, he simply held me there. Then his mouth left mine, tracing a wet path down the column of my throat. He lowered his head, kissing the hollow of my colrbone, then lower still, until his breath ghosted over the curve of my breast, and my nipple tightened into a desperate knot.

  His lips closed around it, and the heat was a sharp, undeniable fre of pleasure. My back arched on a gasp. His other hand reached up, not to touch my other breast, but to cradle the side of my ribcage. His thumb settled just below it, a steady, grounding pressure meant to soothe.

  I could feel it. He was trying to quiet me with this, to give me a softer kind of comfort.

  But it was a dead end. A fire built in the wrong hearth. It pooled in my chest, hot and bright, but it did nothing to ease the deep, insistent ache below. Every soft pull of his mouth only made the emptiness more profound, a stark reminder of where he wasn't.

  Frustration spiked in me, sharp and jagged. I didn't want to be cherished. I wanted the weight of him. I wanted the stretch and the burn and the fullness that would finally quiet the noise in my blood.

  I slid down the mattress, wriggling out from under the torturous attention, until my hips were level with his again.

  My arms wrapped around his head, pulling him up, dragging his mouth back to mine. I locked my legs around his waist, trying to keep him from leaving again.

  The length of him pressed hot against my stomach, a promise of exactly what I was asking for, so close and yet not inside where I needed him to be. The thought that this might stop—might be taken away—sparked something frantic and desperate in me.

  "Please—"

  The word came out broken, torn loose by the pressure building inside me. My hips lifted without thought, my body pleading where my mind could not form nguage.

  He exhaled. This time, he answered.

  He shifted, a slow, deliberate grind, and I felt the slick, blunt head of his cock press right against my entrance.

  The world stopped.

  The inevitability of it stole the air from my lungs. My entire body tensed, coiled around the single point of contact. This was it. The precipice. The ache was about to be answered.

  My lips parted against his. The name came out as a breath, a whisper, a prayer. And with it, everything I'd been holding back since he lost his memory.

  "Rocher."

  He froze.

  The stillness was sudden and absolute, so sharp it hurt.

  For a breathless moment, he hovered there, close enough that I could feel the heat of him, the promise of relief just barely withheld. The pause stretched, unbearable, my want screaming for resolution.

  Something in the air changed.

  Before I could understand what, light fred bright enough to sear through my closed eyes. A sharp pulse tore through me, not pleasure but force. The pressure shattered, ripped away in an instant, leaving my body reeling in its wake.

  I cried out, the sound more startled than anything else, as the heat colpsed inward on itself, yanked out of alignment. My limbs went weak all at once, the world tilting hard beneath me as sensation scattered.

  The st thing I felt was his hands on me—steady, bracing—holding me in pce as everything else fell apart.