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She put a palm against his cheek, “I’m no longer afraid, Usul. Look at me. I see what you see when you hold me thus.”
“What do you see?” he demanded.
“I see us giving love to each other in a time of quiet between storms. It’s what we were meant to do.”
The drug had him again and he thought: So many times you’ve given me comfort and forgetfulness. He felt anew the hyperillumination with its high-relief imagery of time, sensed his future becoming memories—the tender indignities of physical love, the sharing and communion of selves, the softness and the violence.
“You’re the strong one, Chani,” he muttered. “Stay with me.”
“Always,” she said, and kissed his cheek.
He felt her hand against his other cheek, his tears caught between them, and wondered at how sacred this was, how holy, this sharing of water: tears and sweat and…
There were so many cultural things he didn’t know about sex. There were so many physical things he didn’t know about sex, beyond the mechanics and some snippets from Gurney’s more bawdy verses. If his heart weren’t already racing…
“This is not a thing to fear, Usul,” Chani whispers in his ear, and he answers by turning and reciprocating her chaste kiss.
“Sihaya,” he says, trusting their shared visions to communicate all the adoration he felt.
They were kissing, careful and exploratory, hands gentle on the other’s face, in their hair, down their neck and shoulders. He is overwhelmed with the diversity of sensations: the heat of her breath, the smoothness of her hair, the wet slipperiness of her lips. They fumble a little, as Paul tries to add his tongue; she responds with a breathy giggle but lets him in, affirming with a playful bite which goes straight to Paul’s core.
As their kisses grow in intensity, Chani tugs at Paul’s shirt, and enthusiastic to please, Paul scrambles to remove it. The disconnect between his body and his mind makes this a more difficult proposition than it ought to be, and when he turns back to her, she is similarly divested. The wonder must show on his face, for she seems to blush even more.
“Lay back, beloved,” she whispers in his ear, softly kissing his cheek. He does so, shifting awkwardly to arrange himself among the pillows.
His hands—hesitantly hovering at her sides—are shaking, but she squeezes them, and guides them to her breasts. As they settle back into their kissing, he squeezes tentatively, kneading more as her breath catches and she begins to press against his thigh. When he runs his thumbs over her nipples, she moans sweetly and begins kissing down his jaw and his neck.
He lets out a strangled gasp as the drug takes him again, moved to ecstasy by Chani’s kisses. He sees himself leading the Fremen, leading Arrakis, leading the Empire, and in each jolt of vision he sees Chani at his side.
He pulls her close so he can reciprocate, tasting her sweat as he laves down her neck, in the divot of her collarbones, the valley between her breasts. In his lap, Chani writhes with growing urgency. He’s harder than he’s ever been, but he waits for her to progress, even as he knows how this ends.
Well, somewhat. He can’t seem to stop his hands from grabbing at her flesh, slipping his fingertips under the remaining fabric. The coarseness of the linen in contrast to the softness of her skin makes his blood rush, adding a dizziness to the heady sensation already consuming him.
She rolls to the side to take the rest of her clothes off. Paul can’t stop watching, eyes wide to catch every detail—the strength in her legs, the thatch of hair between them, and glimpses of moisture within.
Chani smiles, and runs her eyes over him as if to say, “you, too.”
He sits up to comply, working on the fastenings as best he can with shaking fingers. When she joins him in removing the last barriers between them, he finds comfort in seeing her hands are shaking too.
She runs a hand up and down his shaft, curious at the velvet feel of his flesh. Her other hand reaches down to her own sex, gathering moisture there and bringing it to his. Every tiny movement has Paul’s hips twitch with need, his hands running through his hair in a desperate attempt to make this sensation last.
The feeling of her nervousness rushes over Paul, and he opens his eyes to look into hers as she moves to straddle him again.
“This is not a thing to fear, Sihaya,” he echoes her.
She swallows and nods and positions herself over him. He holds her hips to help steady her, with a bit of a laugh which turns into a moan as she sinks down, engulfing him within her, warm and wet. He throws his head back and sputters her name as she slowly begins to move.
He is lost in sex- and spice-induced ecstasy until the sweet sound of her whimpers brings him back. She is beautiful astride him, hands tangling in her hair, the hard-earned muscle in contrast with the soft bounce of her breasts. Her blue-in-blue eyes are wide, biting her lip as if to concentrate, to hold on to this pleasure, to not let a detail escape.
He is moved with love for her—compassion for the young woman above him, as sad and scared as he is, and a deeper love, a love of many years, of shared lives, grown around each other like vines on Caladan. He shifts to sit up, still buried within her, grasps her against him, forehead-to-forehead, breath-against-breath, hands hungry for every inch of the other.
It’s hard to say how long this lasts, this desperate coupling, rocking against each other, until he spills into her with a cry. He knows it can’t have been too long, but on the precipice of time-become-space and space-become-time, their physical intimacy is temporal eternity.
Chani is running her fingers through his hair—longer than he’s used to keeping it, a fact for which he is currently immensely thankful—and continues kissing him, hungrily and hotly. Paul, breathless and boneless, follows her as she begins to lay backwards, inviting him with the pressing of her tongue into his open mouth.
As Chani grinds against his thigh, he feels the stickiness of his spend and her own wetness. He smiles into their kissing, and she laughs nervously, the fact of what she’s done, what they’ve done, breaking through their shared visions.
Paul breaks away as if to speak, but once again is overwhelmed by the drug and the overflowing emotions he carries for the girl beneath him, flushed and breathless and still wanting, and he returns to her, pressing deliberate, open-mouthed kisses against her cheek, her jaw, and down her neck, lapping at the sweat on her collarbones and moving to her breasts, laving at the marks he left there, and adding a few more.
Her lungs expand and contract with shuddering breaths and he hears his name on her lips like a prayer. He isn’t lucid enough to hear what it is she calls him—Usul, Paul, Muad’Dib—but with their fingers intertwined, he knows it is him.
All pretense of language is gone as he travels further down, a line of kisses down her stomach, over the coarse hair of her sex, and finally delving his tongue in her soft folds.
He makes a face he’s glad she doesn’t see—her arm draped over her eyes, lost in her own visions and ecstasies—but he loves her and an Atreides knows love is obligation, and when she cants her hips up against nothing with a gasp, he dives back in.
It isn’t so bad the second time, and only moments later he knows he could grow to love this, that he does grow to love this, the salty moisture of their fluids, filling his nose and spilling down his chin.
His hands slide under her, wrapping around her thighs and pulling her closer. This is a type of drowning, he thinks, every sense overwhelmed to beyond capacity. Delving his tongue as deep as he can, his nose brushes up against her clit, eliciting twitches and moans.
He wants more; she needs more, and he adjusts to slide in a finger, then two, beckoning towards himself and sucking at her with a kind of urgency until her thighs clench around him as she comes undone.
He comes up sputtering, hair a muss, face flush, lips swollen. She smiles fondly, sits up next to him, loose-limbed and sleepy, chastely kissing his cheek once more before standing to fetch water to clean off. Paul wonders how much of the water was theirs, sweat and humid breath reabsorbed and purified to clean them of the act which caused them.
The clean each other slowly and sweetly. Their shared release has cleared some of the spice-induced ecstasy, and Paul almost feels shy, naked with a pretty girl he has admired for some time, his own human weakness on unobscured display. He is glad they are too tired to speak; he hopes she feels his devotion in the gentleness with which he wipes the sticky evidence from her smooth, lovely body.
They curl up against each other, Chani’s head against his chest, his hand tracing light patterns on her skin. The visions which he feared—of jihad and of the Harkonnens, of his own terrible destiny—still flit around the edges of his mind, but they are glittering and unreal, as distant as Chani is close. As they drift off into sleep, Paul finds comfort in knowing the peace he feels is repeated countless times. How blessed, how holy, how lovely, how true.