Chapter 18: Other methods
The silence in the wake of their collapse was absolute, a thick wool blanket smothering the room. Kerr’s mind was empty, a clean, wind-swept plain. His body was a foreign country, all distant tremors and heavy, spent muscles. Elspeth lay half on him, half on the chair, a slight, warm weight barely rising with her shallow breaths. The only point of clarity was the slow, slick leak of his spend from between her thighs, a cooling trail on his own skin.
Minutes oozed by, measured by the gradual dimming of a candle across the room.
Her finger stirred first, a faint twitch against his sternum. Then a soft, broken sound escaped her lips, not a word, but a punctuation to the enormity of what had just passed between them. She shifted, wincing as muscles protested. Slowly, she pushed herself up, her movements old and careful. Her eyes found his in the gloom. They were dark, glassy with spent sensation, but a familiar, knowing light was kindling deep within.
“You’re still hard,” she whispered, her voice shredded to a rustle.
He was. Even after all that, a low, relentless thrum of need persisted, a ghost of tension in his groin. It wasn’t the frantic demand from before, but a deep, stubborn echo. He looked down at himself, lying thick and heavy against his stomach, glistening with her and him. A part of him felt a distant shame at the sheer inhuman stamina of it. Another part, a louder part, simply didn’t care.
Elspeth saw the conflict flit across his face. She eased herself off his lap, her legs unsteady. She stood for a moment, a pale, bowed figure in the firelight, then she took his hand. Her grip was surprisingly strong. “Come on,” she said, pulling him gently.
He followed, rising from the chair like a man underwater, his movements slow and disjointed. She led him the few steps to the bed. The velvet cover was cool and rumpled. She guided him onto his back, then she climbed up after him, not straddling him this time, but curling onto her side beside him. She pressed her back against his chest, fitted herself into the curve of his body. His arm went around her by instinct, his hand splaying across the tense plane of her belly.
For a long while, they just breathed. His renewed hardness pressed against the cleft of her buttocks, a not-quite-accident.
“Can’t,” he murmured into her hair, the word thick with exhaustion. “You’re spent.”
“I am,” she agreed quietly. She reached back, her hand finding his hip, her fingers digging into the muscle there. “But not there.” She guided him, a subtle shift of her own body, an opening. The head of his cock nudged against a different heat, a tighter, forbidden entrance. “Here.”
A sharp breath hissed through his teeth. “Elspeth…”
“Hush,” she said, her voice steady, a master-class in calm. “Go slow. It’s all right. I want it.” She reached between her own legs, her fingers slicking him with the mess they’d already made, mixing it with a dab of oil from the vial on the bedside table—always there, always prepared. The smell of bergamot and beeswax briefly cut through the musk. “Slow, Kerr. Just… give it to me slow.”
He was powerless to refuse. The permission, the sheer trust of it, stripped him of all remaining thought. He pressed forward, a millimeter of impossible resistance giving way to blistering, snug heat. She gasped, a sharp intake that froze him.
“Don’t stop,” she commanded, her voice tight. “Just go slow.”
He obeyed, feeding himself into her by agonizing, exquisite degrees. It was a different kind of possession, sharper, more concentrated. Her whole body was rigid in his arms, a bowstring pulled taut. He buried his face in the crook of her neck, his breaths coming in ragged bursts against her skin. When he was fully sheathed, they both lay utterly still, acclimating to the profound, burning fullness.
“Andraste’s grace,” she finally breathed, the tension beginning to melt from her into a liquid, accepting warmth. “Always… always forgets how much it takes.”
He began to move. Not the driving pistons of before, but a deep, rolling grind. An exploration of this secret, clenched geography. Each withdrawal was a reluctant surrender, each push home a conquered frontier. Her moans were different here—lower, guttural, punched out of her with every inward stroke.
She reached one hand behind her, clutching at his thigh, holding on as he established a heavy, deliberate rhythm. The sheets whispered beneath them. The bedframe gave a soft, rhythmic creak.
“That’s it,” she chanted, her voice a broken thing. “That’s it. There. Right there.”
He lost himself in the technicality of it, the focus required to maintain that perfect, slow devastation. His own pleasure built not in a sprint but a steep, relentless climb. The tight, silken knot of her body massaged him in a way that was almost painful in its precision. He could feel every ridge, every pulse of her inner flesh as it adapted to him.
The first time he came inside her there, it was with a choked, surprised groan. It felt less like release and more like a foundation being laid, a hot, liquid claim in a deep vault. He spilled into her in long, helpless surges, his body convulsing against her back.
He softened, but didn’t slip out. They dozed like that for a while, maybe minutes, maybe an hour, glued together by sweat and spend. The candles guttered lower.
He woke to the persistent, aching swell again. He was hard inside her once more, a miracle of refractory defiance. He stirred, and she moaned sleepily in response, her body clenching around him in a half-conscious ripple that made him see stars.
“Again,” he whispered, not a question.
She just nodded, her hair tickling his chin.
The second time was rougher. The careful control was gone, burned away by sleep and renewed hunger. He gripped her hip, his fingers leaving pale imprints, and fucked her with deep, measured strokes that shook the bed. Her cries were muffled by the pillow. He felt her climax this time, a series of fierce, fluttering spasms that seemed to pull the very essence from his balls. He followed immediately, his vision whiting out at the edges as he emptied another scalding load into that already-claimed space.
He collapsed, spent in a way that felt final, cellular. He slid out of her, and she curled into a fetal position with a soft, wounded sound. They lay in a wreckage of linens and limbs.
Kerr stared at the canopy. The painful, urgent hardness was still there. It was a dull, pervasive ache now, a constant state of being. He felt raw, used, and yet still inexplicably, relentlessly wanting. He let out a shaky breath that was almost a laugh, almost a sob.
Elspeth heard it. With a monumental effort, she rolled onto her other side to face him. Her face was pale, etched with exhaustion, but her eyes were soft. She looked at his body, at the evidence of his untenable need, jutting up from the thatch of dark hair, glistening and spent and yet stubbornly erect.
“Poor lad,” she murmured, a thread of genuine pity in her tone. She reached out a trembling hand and wrapped her fingers around him. He jumped at the touch, oversensitive, raw. “All that fight in you. Nowhere for it to go.”
She began to stroke him, a slow, milking motion that had nothing to do with her own pleasure. It was purely administrative. A duty. Her thumb smeared the blended wetness across his broad head.
“Just lie back,” she said, her voice gaining a fraction of its old strength. “Don’t think. Don’t try. Just let it happen.”
He obeyed, sinking into the mattress, his arms flung wide. He was a vessel to be emptied. A task to be completed.
She bent her head. Her grey hair trailed across his thighs. She took him into her mouth, not all of him—that was impossible—but a generous, swallowing length. Her tongue was a flats of pure, clever pressure against his most sensitive vein.
He cried out, a hoarse, shattered sound. It was too much. It was everything.
She worked him with a ruthless, tender expertise. There was no teasing, no building. She went straight for the finish, her hollowed cheeks creating a devastating suction, her hand working in tandem with her mouth. She took him deep, gagging slightly, then pulled back to swirl her tongue. She was methodical, relentless, a master craftswoman dismantling a complex mechanism.
Kerr’s hips bucked off the bed, but she held him down with a firm hand on his stomach. He was babbling, words that were not words, pleas to gods he didn’t believe in. The coil in his gut, worn and frayed from overuse, tightened one last, impossible time.
It broke with neither flash nor fury, but as a deep, seismic subsidence. It felt like his soul was being siphoned out through his cock. There was no burst of ecstasy, only a vast, draining unmaking. A quiet implosion.
It went on and on. She sucked and pulled until he was dry, until the pulses became weak, aching shudders, until he was soft and spent in a final, absolute way she had never before achieved.
When she finally released him, with a soft, wet pop, he was blank. His body was a hollow shell. His mind was a silent, dark chamber.
She wiped her mouth with the back of her hand and crawled up to lie beside him, her head on his chest. She listened to the frantic, slowing gallop of his heart.
He tried to speak. To thank her, to curse her, to say her name. His throat worked. Nothing came out. Not a whisper.
Elspeth smiled a small, tired, victorious smile against his skin. She closed her eyes.
“There,” she sighed, her own exhaustion pulling her under. “Now you’re done.”
“Now you’re done.”
A long, trembling sigh left him, a final surrender. The tension he’d carried for days—weeks, maybe—finally seeped into the mattress. His body, a landscape of spent muscle, went profoundly still.
“You’ve ruined me, woman.” He whispered weakly before falling asleep with her head on his chest.
The words were just a breath, rustling against her hair. Then his breathing deepened, turned heavy and regular. The arm around her went slack. She chuckled softly, the sound vibrating against his ribs. She shifted just enough to look down the length of their bodies, the firelight now just ember-glow painting everything in soft, hungry shadows.
She stared at his cock. Mesmerized by it. Even soft, it was a substantial weight in its nest of dark hair, damp and gleaming. A testament to the sheer, absurd volume of what had passed between them tonight. It lay against his thigh, seemingly as dead as the rest of him.
She reached down and touched it, her fingers feather-light on the sensitized skin. It twitched. A faint, reflexive pulse. He didn’t wake. His breath continued its slow, deep tide. A soft snore caught in his throat.
So without thinking she began to stroke. Not to wake him, not really. It was a private fascination. A revisiting of the terrain. Her touch was gentle, curious. She traced its length, circled the broad head, feeling the unique silken texture of him. Working her masterful wrists to the rhythm of the wonderful slippery sound of him. The soft, wet friction was obscenely loud in the silent room.
It began to fill under her ministrations, thickening and lengthening without any conscious command from him. It was a pure, animal response. Life independent of mind. His unconscious moans resonated throughout her cunt. A low, deep groan rumbled in his chest, a sound of pure physiology, of nerves firing without permission. It triggered an answering throb deep within her own exhausted flesh.
She watched, hypnotized, as it rose to its full, formidable attention. Standing straight up from his body, a stark silhouette against the dim glow. He was deeply, utterly asleep. His face was slack, peaceful. The contrast was dizzying.
Her hand tightened. She began a proper rhythm, up and down the shining shaft. Her other hand cupped his balls, gently weighing the heaviness there. How much could possibly be left? The question was its own compulsion.
His hips gave a tiny, stuttering thrust into her fist. Another gut-deep groan escaped his lips. His eyelids fluttered but didn’t open. He was a ship coasting on a dream sea, his body acting out its own storyline.
She quickened her pace, her own breath coming short. This was a theft. A secret. Her palm smoothed over the head with each upstroke, collecting the fresh bead of moisture that welled from the tip. The sound was utterly lewd, a steady, slick shush, shush, shush that seemed to sync with the embers’ dying pulse.
His breathing hitched. His abdominal muscles tightened. A tremor ran through his thighs.
She pulls another load from him in his sleep. It came not with a cry, but with a choked, sighing expulsion of air. His body arched slightly, pressing into her hand, as a few last, thick ribbons pulsed onto his own stomach. The heat of it shocked her fingers.
He settled instantly back into profound stillness. The rigid column in her hand softened, succumbing to a true, final exhaustion.
She chuckled to herself, a low, victorious sound, as she fell asleep on his chest. She didn’t wipe him clean. She left the evidence there, a sticky, cooling testament to her quiet labor. Her ear listened to the strong, slow beat of his heart beneath her cheek, a drum she had synced her own pulse to for more years than either would ever say aloud. The last of the light failed, and the room belonged entirely to the dark and the warmth of their tangled, ruined peace.