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He’s nothing like her Sevro. His energy is watchful, coiled like a spring, no less potent for being leashed. Little about Sevro was leashed, not his energy nor his thoughts nor his tongue; only, it sometimes seemed, his desire for her. He’d been so careful at first, so tentative, so disbelieving that she could want him. Victra thinks maybe he never stopped, that some small part of him always wondered how she could want him, even after years and wars and children together, right up to the end.
Darrow takes it for granted. He takes her roughly, often pushing her to the bed, rolling her to her belly, dragging her hips back and up with both hands as he makes her body ache with commingled pleasure and pain. He overwhelms her with his single-minded need, which is exactly how Victra wants it with him. Sevro always had something to leave her for. The Sons, his howlers, Darrow himself. And she loved him for it, gods, how much she’d loved him. But right now Victra needs someone who seems like he would die before he would ever leave her.
“Harder,” she grunts, fisting both hands in the sheets on either side of her face. It makes the fabric tent between them and she catches it with her teeth when he complies, his hands probably making bruises on her hips as he drives into her. With each thrust, Darrow stills when he’s fully inside her, for so long that each time she begins to wonder if he’ll ever move away. It’s the most soothing balm she can imagine. “Don’t go” she finds herself thinking each time he finally begins his withdrawal, until only her strength of will keeps her from weeping. She’d been angry at him once for taking Sevro from her when she knew he likely wouldn’t return, she’d hated him for not making Sevro stay, but it had faded so quickly. Her husband made his own choices. Darrow was really as beholden to those choices as she.
The sheet is dry on her tongue, so she spits it out and pushes up on her knees until he’s hitting just the right spot inside her, the spot that makes her forget everything but the way she feels. He growls his approval, his thumbs landing just where the dimples at the base of her spine are as he pulls her hips back against his, the contact of their bodies loud and perfect and obscene; often, Sevro had touched those same spots, with fingers and lips and tongue. They’d spent so many hours together, learning each other, learning themselves anew. She’d felt like a goddess to Sevro. With Sevro.
With Darrow, she feels like a Pink. It’s addictive. Seductive. So easy to close off everything and focus on the feel of his hands on her, his cock inside her, that spring-coiled energy driving everything else out of her head. What they do together is too feral and filthy to let her dwell on their dead. It’s a far better oblivion than drink or drug, however brief and ephemeral.
It could have easily been different. She’d had softer feelings for Darrow once, long ago, before her love for him mellowed into the closest of friendship. A scant handful of different turns, a few clicks to one side or the other… If Victra had been in their year at the Institute, if she’d known Darrow then as well as she came to know him in the fleet, before Virginia took hold of him as much as Sevro later took hold of her. They might mourn their friends, instead of their partners. They might thank the stars above that the one who mattered most to them was spared.
It’s a disturbing thought, and Victra returns to it often, between times, picking at it like a scab. She reminds herself that Sevro was her choice, and not just something that happened to her. Her choice, and one she would make again, even knowing how it ended.
She knows without asking that Darrow would choose Virginia over and over, in any universe.
She’d asked him once if he was imagining Virginia when he fucked her. If he ever imagined his first wife when he fucked Virginia. It was a cruel thing to ask, she knew, even though her intention wasn’t to hurt him. He’d laughed. She knows that her brusqueness, her lack of sentiment is a balm to him as much as his intensity is to her. She doesn’t make him think, she doesn’t make him talk. She just makes him come.
It’s her favorite part, when Darrow comes. She could almost imagine he’s pouring himself into her, turning himself inside out to fill the void that aches inside her like hunger. He always tries to bring her with him, snaking his hand beneath her hips or flipping her to her back to touch her clit – once, disastrously, he’d tried with his mouth, something only Sevro had ever done before; she’d kicked him away and cried, making him leave rather than be witness to her dissolution. He’d stayed away for days, until they were both so hollow and desperate that they broke down and begged each other to bring sweet oblivion back. Victra doesn’t always let him make her come. When he wakes in the night and reaches for her again, groaning helplessly as if he’s in her thrall and only being inside her will make him whole, the waiting makes it better, makes her come harder and longer and more.
Even then, it’s only when she wakes in his arms the next morning that what they’re doing feels like betrayal.
She always fucks him again, then, before he can wake up and feel the same way she does. That’s what this is for, after all. That’s what lets their bodies feel, for once, rather than their hearts. Just a little while. Just for now.