Chapter Text
“Tired?”
Her eyes are heavy, body languid in the bath. “I shouldn’t be, I got lots of sleep last night.” She yawns, nuzzles her nose on the thick column of his throat. “You know, I can’t remember the last time I took a nap… Yesterday must’ve been my first nap in years.”
He lifts her hips a little to slip out of her, adjust his sweatpants. In the otherwise pleasantly blank haze that is her mind, it occurs to Rey how regrettable it is that Ben Solo’s dick can’t stay hard, and inside her, all the time.
“Do you want to go back to sleep?” She feels his lips on her hair. “Go in the shower and wash off.”
“Okay.” But stays limp and unmoving in his arms. For his part he doesn’t do anything to nudge her into action either, just starts gently brushing a clump of knots at the ends of her hair.
“Can I ask you something?” he says after a while.
She wiggles on his lap, looking for optimal comfort, nodding.
His hand stills on her back. “Why don’t you have a boyfriend? Is it… not your thing?”
She can fall asleep just like this, collapsed on him. Feeling how solid he is. “When would I have found the time,” she mumbles lazily.
“Right.” He goes back to untangling her hair, quiet for so long that when he speaks again she misses it, having almost slipped into a light sleep.
“What was that?”
“I was just thinking, now that you’ll have the time,” he says, stilted, “you could… date guys.”
“I… could?”
“You. Could,” he repeats, face blank. He straightens, leans back and away from her. All of a sudden, she feels how cold the bath water has gone.
“Okay… I mean, I wasn’t planning to, but… okay.” With her left hand, she braces herself and stands, careful on the wet tiled floor as she pads to the shower area, separated by a glass panel.
Under the stream, she watches as he empties the tub, replaces the bottle of bubble bath in the cabinet, dries the floor with bath mats, all in that serious and focused way of his, a crease between his brows becoming more and more pronounced.
She turns the shower off, listening to the sound of water swirling down the drain, and notices the way he hesitates for a fraction of a second before taking out another bath mat from the cabinet. As if keenly aware of her as she is of him. “Are you going to join me here?” she finally asks.
They regard each other in silence for longer than it seems necessary before he abandons the chaos of the bath mats and steps in the enclosed space with her.
When he rests his hands on her hips, she puts hers on his shoulders, like they’re about to slow-dance under the shower. “What was all that about?”
“Nothing.”
She observes the blush contrasting the deepening frown on his mouth. “I’ve just never had time for boys,” she explains, “because even while I was still in school, I was working every chance I could… I’ve been working odd jobs since I can remember, and that really takes up all my time… It’s not like I have this list of guys I want to date as soon as—”
“I don’t want you to date guys,” he blurts. “It’s—it’s a pretty fucking hypocritical thing of me to say, I know—I’m not—I don’t—” He presses his lips into a hard line. His hands tighten around her waist, like an involuntary spasm, before letting go. “I want you just for myself.” Reaching past her, he turns the shower back on.
Her heart somersaults several times. “Okay, I won’t.” Tentatively, she reaches for the hem of his t-shirt.
“If I take my clothes off, I’m gonna have to fuck you again,” he points out. "You're not sore?"
“Oh. I am, actually… But just a bit.”
He drops his head on her shoulder, groaning. “God. I’m sorry.” Tentatively, she moves her hand to caress the back of his neck. “Your first time should’ve at last been on a fucking bed. What was I thinking? With you, I always—” He sighs. “Don’t let me get away with it again.”
“Get away with what?”
“With being a greedy, selfish bastard. I should’ve made your first time, I don’t know, special. That’s what they say.”
“Who?”
“People.” He straightens up again, and she mourns the chance to continue touching his nape tenderly.
“But it was perfect,” she counters, low and quiet.
He runs a hand through his hair to brush wet tendrils away from his eyes. Peering down at her with a touchingly worried look, he asks, “You really liked it? You weren’t just doing it... because I told you to?”
“I liked it." Wasn’t he in the same room when she liked it twice? She watches water sluicing down his body, washing froth and foam from his skin and clothes. She touches his shirt again. “I want to see you. Can I? It’s only fair.”
“Let’s just get you into dry clothes and back in bed. I’ll make the pancakes. Jesus, I was supposed to be making pancakes. And we got your brace all wet, it’s all a mess, I shouldn’t have come inside you, you're not—” Her hand skitters to the waistband of his sweatpants. “Rey,” he repeats.
“I just want to see you,” she insists.
“I mean.” She shifts in place, unable to look away. “I mean—”
“This is embarrassing,” he mutters, a flush creeping up from his neck. He turns the shower off.
She lets her fingertips trace the hard ridges and plains of his chest and torso, and watches in amazement when he tenses where she touches him. “I wouldn’t be embarrassed, if I were you.”
He pushes her roughly against the tiled wall. “Do you really like it, like this?”
“Yes, yes,” she says, frantic.
He turns her around, her back to his chest. "This is really okay, Rey?"
"Yes, sir, please, I—"
He bends her over a little, pushes her ass up, notching himself inside her. She holds still, feeling that initial stretch. When her soft flesh yields to him, hard and warm and insistent, their sighs, shuddery in relief, mirror each other’s. “Kiss me, please,” she whimpers, looking over her shoulder at him.
It’s sloppy, more just him breathing into her open mouth, swallowing her helpless moans than a proper kiss, but he’s thrusting so deep inside her, and she thinks she doesn’t ever want him to stop.
“Touch yourself,” he orders, watching with voracious eyes when she starts circling her clit. But it’s not long before she begins making small whining sounds because it’s not doing it for her, and they both know it.
“Look at you,” he spits out, slapping her hand away. “I own you now, don’t I? You’re always going to need me, if you want to come.” He pulls out slowly before thrusting back in, making her gasp. He touches her clit and her body responds immediately, so willing and ready. “Your little recordings and your pathetic fumbling won’t ever be enough anymore.” He adds, with a kind of dark delight or twisted amusement—"I haven't even gone down on you."
He fucks her like this, mind in a fugue of want and more and right there, his other hand pressing the small of her back as he pummels into her until she orgasms for the third time this morning with a strangled cry.
“—not gonna come in you again, have to—”
“No, no, inside, please,” she sobs, backing her ass up into him.
“Fuck, oh fuck,” he chokes out, the rhythm of his hips stuttering. With a long, indulgent groan in the shell of her ear, he spends himself inside her.
She’s stuffing her mouth full of pancake and strawberries, the plate balanced on her lap, while he massages her foot.
“Good?”
She nods, smiling.
They’re on the sofa in his living room, his Rachmaninoff record playing in the background. Chewie, having forgiven them both for locking him out of the bathroom, is preoccupied with his peanut butter-covered lick mat, his tail swishing happily.
“I noticed…” he begins, but stops. He presses a thumb on her heel, the pressure just on the right side of pleasure rather than pain.
She swallows her mouthful of pancake, licks her lips clean of maple syrup. “What?”
“I noticed you didn’t ask if I would stop seeing other women.”
“Oh.” She goes back to her plate, popping several raspberries in her mouth. “I didn’t think I could ask that of you. You’re the one who gets to decide the terms of the agreement.”
“Do you want me to?”
Rey wants many things, she realizes now, and it seems dangerous to give into them. It turns out, however, that the more she gets, the more she wants to take and take.
“I want you just for myself, too,” she says, heart beat quickening at the admission.
He holds her in his gaze, quiet and unrevealing, and it’s both a kindness and a meanness that he lets the opaque silence stretch so long.
She sets her empty plate on the table, next to the glass of orange juice, and the blowdryer he’d used to dry her brace, casting around for something else to say, fearing what he’ll tell her but unable to stand another second of nothing.
Abruptly, he pulls at her calves, dragging her to him until she’s stumbling into his lap. It feels increasingly like her favorite place to be. “That’s exactly what I wanted to hear, Rey,” he murmurs, approving, cooing in that darkly sweet tone, like she’s just a small thing for him to play with. "Now tell me about these jobs you've had."
“That’s how little they pay you? But in total that’s just—” They step out of the drug store, walking in step on the pavement. “After washing dishes for four hours, every night?”
She shrugs.
“But Chewie’s expenses…”
“It was loads better than working at that auto repair shop. At least I didn’t smell like grease oil for days. Just fried food,” she tries to joke.
He doesn’t seem amused at all, his face clouding over. “Did you ever find out which small-dicked asshole ratted you out to the manager?”
She remembers the perv who’d asked for a blow, vaguely. “I don’t even think about it anymore,” she says, which is true in a way. Chewie tugs on his leash, barking urgently for them to walk faster. She smiles at the dog’s eagerness.
She keeps smiling. Back at his place, she’d caught herself just in time before she could squeal after he said they could go out to walk Chewie and run a few errands. The “errands” turned out to be buying burgers for lunch, and getting her the morning-after pill. He’d let her hold Chewie’s leash this whole time, and that simple thing has been giving her an outsized amount of joy.
He keeps accidentally brushing his arm against hers as they walk side by side. People pass them by and she thinks maybe they think she and Ben Solo are together, like a couple, and she feels herself preening inwardly. It’s stupid and embarrassing, except she can’t tamp it down.
Making an effort to compose her face now, she continues, “First Order pays way better anyway.”
“Does the cleaning job pay even better than FO? Because, yesterday, you said, or implied, that you like it more than your desk job...”
“A part of it was because I was upset at you,” she admits after a pause.
“Right. Because of what I said to Armie…” At length, he adds, “You weren’t really going to quit FO, were you?”
When he asks things like this, Rey’s impulse is to come up with a lie. It’s what she’s used to. “I… thought about it, yes," she admits again.
“I see…”
At the dog park, they sit on a shaded bench, the paper bag of take-out food between them, to watch Chewie from a distance as he runs around annoying the smaller dogs.
“That was a particularly abysmal week at the office, which is really saying something. The only thing I had to look forward to was getting to talk to you on the phone…” He crosses and recrosses his ankles, long legs stretched out. “I thought at first you were just busy, but when it finally dawned on me that you were actively trying to avoid me… I was so pissed off at your non-existent boyfriend. For hogging you. It was like I was a child again and throwing a tantrum, unable to tell anyone why, or if I even had a reason to be upset.” He transfers the paper bag of food to his other side, making her keenly aware of his hand on the bench, mere inches from hers. “I’m sorry I said what I said, instead of owning up to what I really felt.”
A breeze passes through the shade, ruffling his hair. “I wouldn’t have known about it… if I wasn’t tapping your phone,” she reminds him.
“If it happens again, which I swear—just—will you tell me?”
He’s so beautiful like this, with the dappled light and his white t-shirt and his hair. “Tell you what?”
“If I do something, and it hurts you, will you promise to tell me?” He moves closer, covers her hand in his. "So I could apologize and make it right?"
“Okay,” she croaks.
“And will you promise not to disappear on me?”
“Huh?” is the most she can manage, mildly panicking over the continued press of his hand.
“I assumed that’s what you were going to do. We weren’t—you would’ve just done it, right? And I would’ve gone to work one day, and Bazine, or someone from HR, would tell me in passing, like it was nothing, that the new girl had quit.”
The trees whisper secrets in the late afternoon.
“I thought… I didn’t know you even…” There’s an ache in her chest.
“Now you do, Rey,” he murmurs.
On the leisurely walk back to his building, with the sun behind them, about to set, she mentally rehearses different ways to ask him, until she’s so worked up she just blurts it out, like ripping a band-aid, “Does this mean I don’t have to stay at the hotel suite?”
He’s scrolling through his phone, picking out a pizza order for dinner. “Yeah. Finn can stay if he wants,” he says, nonchalant. “You should tell him to start looking for a place though, he really shouldn’t stay in that apartment any more than he has to. I can help, if he needs it.” He looks up from his phone then. “We can get your things tomorrow. After work.”
“Get my… things?”
A smile slowly unfurls on his face. “Yes, Rey, your things. Since I’ve decided you’re moving in with me.”