Chapter Text
Summer comes again.
The leaves on the trees lining her street are heavier, their edges burnt.
The sun bursts from behind the red-brick houses out her window around ten in the evening, instead of four during the winter.
Lately, the city has been feeling new, and Rey is just starting to understand it grows and moves and has a life of its own, completely independent of her own narratives in it.
She goes along its tide.
She takes a journal out, brand new, a birthday gift from Finn. She sits on her bed and writes a few words with a cheap ballpoint. Nice weather. Not too hot. I’ve been having a lot of good days. Trying my best to enjoy them.
Dinner parties and prolonged after-work drinks with Finn and Rose at new bars with new money stream into her monotonous days behind her desk at the statistics center. On the weekend, she shows up to the occasional mechanic gig at the shop downtown with apple-red cheeks and a spring in her step.
She picks up books at the library around the block and reads them. In the morning, she listens to old Carole King songs. She buys a ticket for a movie she read about on social media. In the dark, surrounded by no one but a few strangers scattered around the room, Rey cries.
They’re fresh tears.
Even on the train or in her bed sometimes, on not-so-good days, they don’t feel stale anymore.
Things start falling into place — and of course, to help soften the land, there is Ben.
She keeps a fond memory of their first-real-date.
A couple texts, easier than she’d thought (It was nice seeing you the other day. Are you free next week? I’m free this week. Friday? It’s a date) a bottle of juice in his hands, fidgeting with it, the flow of her brand new dress around her body, conversation picking up roughly where they’d left it, a little less than a year ago.
She had a new job. So did Ben.
Kylo was doing great. “He’s starting kindergarten in September. I’m tryin to get him used to the idea, but it’s not as tough as I thought it would be. He’s very excited about us labeling his clothes and shoes. My mom says I was the same at his age.”
He had been meeting with his mother more frequently in the last year, around the time he cut all ties with his supplier and decided it was time for things to change.
Rey felt an ache glow blood-red in her chest, listening to the way he’d called one day and it wasn’t like nothing had ever changed, could never go back to how it had once been, but his mother was there and she loved him and it’s all that mattered.
But Ben was as devastating and warm as she remembered — and having him here, with her, felt so miraculous she easily let her envy go back to where it belonged, where it couldn’t poison her.
He took every turn of conversation with grace, absorbing information with his usual soft gaze casted on her, as she gauged his reactions to the newer, less scrambled version of her. He offered his advice, but didn’t try to smother her self-doubt too forcefully, squeezed gently at its throat to let her thoughts fully unravel, knowing it was a facade for deeper fears.
“You most likely won’t stay at your first job for more than a year or two—“
“It’s not my first job. Some of us were elbow-deep in diapers and summoning Bluey’s predecessors in middle school…”
“I meant your first job after graduating.”
“I haven’t graduated yet. Special commission isn’t until October, they’ll probably haul me with kids born in the…” she mimicked a shiver of horror, “… 2000’s… And I interned at that specific center for like, three summers in a row. So it’s not like I’m new at it, really.”
“Okay, fair enough,” Ben sighed, a small smirk pulling at his lips. “What I’m saying is, it’s okay to feel trapped at your first job after a long period of transition like the one you just went through. Still going through. I would tell you to trust the process and embrace the frustration, but. You’ll have something witty and wonderful to counter that, won’t you?”
A flush spread to her neck. “It’s not the fact that I’m fucking bored all the time that frustrates me. That could happen with any job. I’m just— I’m scared of settling for this. I’m scared I’ll never find out how boring or exciting other jobs can be.”
“You’ve been through a lot, Rey. It’s okay to choose safety for now. There’s no rush. And at some point, you’ll start getting more and more invested in your life outside of work, and eventually feel steady enough that you’ll get out, and you’ll try to find something that excites you.”
Witty and wonderful kept running in circles in a giddy part of her mind, all throughout Ben’s stories about his first job after school (“I did sell drugs on the side and got caught, so. Maybe best if you don’t take advice from me,” he chuckled, but Rey shrugged and countered, “If you can’t take advice from your friendly neighborhood ex-drug dealing dad, who do you reach out to in times of uncertainty?” and he looked up to meet her eyes, in the low peach glow of her apartment).
The job search had been painful and humiliating for him. He didn’t shy away from talking about it, which she appreciated.
“I grew up privileged enough I didn’t even know what a social worker actually did until I lost my job. And even after that, I mean, I ditched all my appointments. I never made the effort to understand why I was put through this process in the first place. But I didn’t really have a choice this time. It’s a requirement from the employment center. My ego was— bruised, to say the least. But more so because I spent so much time avoiding it… And the real humiliation was finding out that it’s exactly what I needed to get back on track.”
She told him about the dozens of social workers she’d seen over the years, how some had changed her life for the worse and others for the better, so much so she decided at seventeen she wanted to dedicate her life to helping kids in her situation, too.
And how now, she’d rather be bored senseless in a cubicle in the outskirts of the city, rather than experience how brutal the job and all the injustice surrounding it were for a single day.
Between them, she felt it, that they were at similar stages of their lives.
In the way every word mattered, the way he listened and she did too, it was there, intact, the invisible thread tying them together.
The conversation eventually fizzled out and Rey started stretching, cross-legged on the velvet chair. He got up from the folding chair she’d gotten out for him, careful not to mess with the bedside table she repurposed as a dining one for the occasion, and walked to the door.
Ben wrapped his arms around her then, chaste and tender. His hands, holding the keys to the old Fiat, upside down, splayed across her back. Hers, barely fisting his shirt.
He placed a single kiss on her cheek, so quick she barely had time to register it happened before their noses almost brushed and he smiled down at her.
“Good night,” Ben said. He turned into the darkness of the staircase.
Rey stayed a minute, two with his kiss after she heard the door slam shut downstairs.
The hands, they moved.
Second date, Ben and her lying side by side on her bed, exhausted by the noise and the agitation of the noodle place she’d picked, his hands flat against the taut skin of his abdomen.
They stared at the ceiling in not-quite complete stillness, fan blowing in their direction. After a while, a laugh started bubbling from Ben’s chest, in ricochets against the walls.
“I was just thinking about your power bill.”
“What?”
She turned to her side.
“Your power bill. The fan. It’s always on. Even in the winter. I know you haven’t turned that thing off in years.”
She gave him a weak nudge in the ribs. He caught her hand, started playing with her fingers.
She could tell he was mustering the courage to go further, by the way his lips twisted and his laughter died down.
“I turn it off while I’m not there, obviously. And I see it as an investment in my mental health.” She rubbed her eyes with her free hand. “I can’t stand the silence. Still can’t, I mean. After everything… Yeah.”
He rolled to face her. A light flutter, deep in her stomach. His thumb traced her cheekbone, her chin.
“I don’t mind,” he said. “It’s not like I haven’t been sleeping with a baby monitor right next to my face for the past two years. Almost three now. I can’t fall asleep if I’m not listening to his breathing.”
“I miss him,” Rey said. She felt drawn to him, not letting hesitation wash over her and welcomed the rush of just reaching out and grazing at his eyelashes. “I babysat for a couple families this year. None of the kids were as cool and collected as Kylo. He’s just a great baby. Kid, I mean.”
Ben hummed.
“He is. I would tell you he misses you too, but… You know.”
“Yeah.” A strange melancholy clung to her, the same when she’d left her last foster family and had to say goodbye to the kids she babysat around town. None of them were older than three or four. They wouldn’t remember her, and she could never forget them.
“Hey.” Sensing her distress, Ben wiggled closer to her and wrapped his hands around hers. “You’ll see him again. Soon. Not sure he’ll remember you entirely but you also won’t be a total stranger. Baz’s sister moved to Australia and he’s just seen her last week after a year. They immediately hit it off. You’ll be fine.”
“I don’t want you… To feel like you have to let me back into your lives. I know the way we met was kind of fucked up. And the way it ended the first time was… Yeah.” She gulped back her tears. “I would understand if you wanted to wait a while.”
His brow creased. “I don’t want to wait a while. I want you back in our lives, like, right now. Do you want that?”
She nodded, almost in disbelief.
“Yeah. I do.”
Third and fourth date in the squeaky-new now.
His hands around Kylo’s arms, helping him up from the questionable sandbox. Flat into the grass next to Rey’s, a crawl away from holding them.
Wrapped around the handles of a useless stroller (“Don’t need it. I walk,” is the first thing Kylo says to Rey as Ben opens the front door, both pretending they weren’t nervously pacing on either side of it five seconds ago). Offering her a too-dry butter cookie. Pointing at the ducks (“They’re ducks,” Kylo declares, padding to the fence separating him from the artificial pond and curtly inviting her to do the same), the swings (“Push me, please,” he demands, and Rey obliges).
Tucked with his arms crossed on his chest, watching Rey become familiar with the peculiar force that is his son again.
Pinky grazing her thigh, her hand as they walk back under a light summer shower, an eye on Kylo huffing and puffing, attempting to push the stroller on his own (after she’d turned down the toddler’s offer, “I push. You sit.”)
Circling her arm at the train station. “I’ll see you soon,” he says, and yes, soon, please, she breathes back, prompting him to cup her cheek and bring her face to his, giving her lips a sweet, sweet kiss.
She kisses him back, clenching her fist at her side. Wishing it to never become just a habit.
Fifth, sixth, seventh — knees, thighs and wherever they lead, ribs, mouth, bringing her lips to his and carrying the words, “You’re beautiful,” and “I thought about this — so much,” through long July afternoons spent rolling around in her bed, rubbing and touching and crossing new lines with the same rush to the heart each time.
His body tight with want, legs straining against hers and voice veiled, “We should really, really stop now if we don’t want to—“
I want to, she’s dying to scream, I want to, I want to. I want your hands that know how to do everything just right and your mouth everywhere it hasn’t been yet and I want mine on every inch of you.
Adjusting himself in his shorts and holding her goodbye, an embrace tinted with urgence that leaves her head spinning and mouth open around easy giggles, cascading out her window, watching his car disappear at the very end of her street, where the hill softens into a downward curve.
Him ending each date with a raging hard-on and a flustered Bye, I’ll see you soon. I’ll miss you in the shell of her ear isn’t necessarily for her sake, she knows that. He needs that time to let himself be fully vulnerable with her.
She lets him take it — whatever he wants, he can have.
There’s time and space for all that awaits them.
The beach trip is Rey’s idea.
Boredom sweeps over hot and heavy mid-August days. Baz and Kylo are busy helping her sister settle into her new house. Ben is saving his days off for an extended Christmas break, and Rey’s current fixation is that maybe, if things keep going well, they’ll spend the holidays together. After a lot of lunch break bathroom stall scheming and notes app calculations, she decides not to join her friends in the mountains for their annual hike.
Their respective offices are as desert as the rest of the city, and there can only be so many heatwave sleepovers, slumped on her bed, watching Norwegian teen dramas to manifest a cold breeze and kill some time.
“I think I’m gonna take next Monday off,” she says from under the feeble spray of her shower while he’s dicing tomatoes and sweating profusely, “We could go up the river, spend the day at the beach. And then we could get pizza and eat it at the park for dinner, if we feel like it. What do you say?”
Ben says yes.
And so, the next Monday, he’s packing a cooler in the trunk of his Fiat and they’re fighting over whether this and the towels and the football he insists on taking will all fit and Rey is glancing at him with every song she picks, her tiny speaker on the dashboard, and he ignores her weak attempts at forcing her debit card into his hands when they reach the toll booth, and it’s as though the year between them having stupid, life-changing sex and now has never existed.
It’s not necessarily being at the beach, which she actually finds to be a wholly unattractive activity — sand everywhere, the smell of warm mayonnaise all over their beach bag, other people’s children.
It’s the way Ben looks at her.
He looks at her and holds her hand to dip their toes in the sea, jokes about their feet falling off with how polluted the area is. He looks at her, rubs sunscreen on her shoulders and her back, lingers around the ties of her decaying bikini, takes a picture of her reading with his hat on, curled to her side, hugging the untouched football. He looks at her, licking sauce off her fingers and moaning about the amount of sand she swallows along with cheap ham and soggy bread. She can even feel him looking at her pretending to fall asleep, cheek to chest, her thigh possessively thrown across his.
But he doesn’t do anything about it.
In fact, nothing out of the ordinary happens until he’s driving them home.
Julian Casablancas’ voice is spilling out of the speaker, nothing but a stretch of highway ahead of them, her phone informing her she’s out of storage as she tries to pick another app to delete to make room for the thousands of pictures she took since June, fucking sand making her squirm uncontrollably in her seat.
Ben keeps stealing glances at her lap.
Her skin is incredibly paler than it usually gets in the summer, but to be fair, his is almost translucent.
She crosses her legs, a feeling of nakedness making her skin crawl.
She’s also egregiously aware that he’s sitting where they had sex, a little less than a year ago.
It only makes the sand ride higher between her thighs. She clenches her teeth, letting the smallest huff of discomfort out.
Ben clears his throat. “I need to get some gas.”
“Okay.” Her voice comes out tense. “I’ll use the bathroom real quick.”
He pulls over at the next gas station. Rey is about to jump out of the car the second it comes to a stop by the pumps, but Ben puts his hand over hers.
“Wait.”
He grabs a sweater from the backseat and hands it to her. She mutters a thank you and slips it on.
She walks into the station, pulling the collar of the sweatshirt over her nose and inhaling deeply.
Sunscreen and sweat and Ben.
The bathroom is empty. She leans over a sink for a second, a little out of breath and, frankly, kind of dizzy with how pent up she’s been the past few weeks. She sprays some water on her cheeks and neck. “I got this,” she mutters to herself, not meeting her own eyes in the mirror.
If Ben isn’t ready to take their relationship to the next level, then… It’s his right. The ride home is about to be agonizing, but it is his right.
Maybe he’s just not that much of a sexual person. Although both times they were intimate (first time being kind of a reach, as she was half-comatose and too high to properly register what she was doing, and beat herself up over it for weeks), she got the feeling he was more in control of himself than uninterested . Like he didn’t want to freak her out.
And now she’s the sex freak getting horny over the most harmless things, like him doing the dishes last week, or changing the batteries of her fairy lights yesterday night. She spends so much time fantasizing about having real, sober sex with him she’s getting actually sick of how horny her own internal monologue is becoming.
She whips out her period tracking app. Not even ovulating yet.
Right.
She sighs, and tries her best to wipe the sand away, locked in one of the stalls. Once she’s done, sand clinging to her inner thighs still, unable to reach as far or as hygienically as she’d like, she hides her swimsuit beneath the hem of Ben’s sweatshirt again, glances at her reflection and trots back to the car.
Ben sees her across the parking lot and reaches out to open the door for her. The moment she sits down, his hand wraps around her thigh. It’s warm, a little damp, even with the Fiat’s shitty AC on full blast.
Heat rises to her cheeks.
“All good?” he asks.
There’s a strain in his voice. She looks at him through her eyelashes.
His eyes roam over his sweater, landing on the hand clutching her leg.
Time stands still. Rey’s skin erupts in goosebumps. A shiver courses through her. And then—
There’s no way of knowing if it’s him who lurches forward, or her. It doesn’t matter. Because she’s the one to immediately card her fingers through his hair and trace the seam of his lips with the tip of her tongue. And he’s the one to grunt and lick into her mouth.
And maybe he’s not a non-sexual person after all. The death grip on her thigh will probably leave bruises and account for that (she hopes it does).
Getting lost in Ben’s kiss is the easiest thing in the world. His hand skates over her stomach, taut with anticipation, her chest, before it nestles in the crook of her neck, thumb pulling at her jaw to open her mouth even more.
He kisses her like he’s starving for her.
Like the world has fallen apart around them.
But— a furious succession of honks abruptly drags Rey out of the moment. Ben’s peering at her, confused and wild, a fine string of saliva between them.
He pulls back to his seat, rushing to buckle his seatbelt after another drawn-out honk and some unintelligible yelling behind them.
“Okay, okay, Jesus, I’m moving, alright?” He flips them off blindly and drives them out of the gas station in sharp turns that have Rey gripping the passenger door.
They drive in dead silence for what feel like the longest minutes of Rey’s life.
Out of the corner of her eye, she sees Ben grit his jaw, his knuckles white around the wheel.
Dread settles in the pit of her stomach. She starts fidgeting in her seat.
Half-decent sorries muddle in her mind, hey, I shouldn’t have done that, you’re obviously not ready and I can wait, and I promise I’m not like sex-crazed or anything, not that being sex-crazed is inherently wrong, or maybe I kinda am actually but it’s not your fault, and we can take our time and we don’t even have to sleep together—
The blinker lights up.
Ben pulls the car over to the other lane, and exits the highway into a rest area. As they slow down and come to a full stop at the very end of the shaded, empty concrete rectangle, Rey feels her heart beating in her throat.
He unbuckles his seatbelt. They stay still for a few seconds, turned to the trees like it’s still the road, unraveling.
She opens her mouth, already shaped around a shitty apology, but then Ben’s lips cover it and shut her up, and his hands are everywhere, pulling his sweatshirt over her head and pawing at her tits through her flimsy top.
He doesn’t take the time to look at them, just dips into her cleavage in a brusque movement, nudges at the fabric with his nose and scrapes his teeth over one of her nipples.
A weak scream spills out of Rey’s throat and dies in the suddenly narrower-than-usual interior of his car. It morphs into a soft moan as Ben brings his hand to her other breast, kneading her and sucking her in.
Hungry.
Definitely hungry.
She throws her head back, growing dizzier by the second, the feeling of his tongue lapping at her and the vibrations of his voice whispering things she can’t quite make out against her skin intoxicating.
His fingers crawl from her pebbled skin to her pubic bone. He glances at her, lips the same shade of pinkish red as her nipple.
“Is this okay?” he breathes, fingertips skimming over the knot at her hip.
“Um. I still have sand everywhere, I tried to wipe most of it off, but—“ She kind of hates herself for using a word as unsexy as wiping , and hates that his long, thick fingers are, in fact, not going to be inside of her in the next fifteen seconds.
But the perspective of getting a UTI right as she’s about to fuck Ben again, finally, is dreadful enough to get her her hand to wrap around his wrist, and bring it to his crotch instead.
She nips at his earlobe, reveling in the small gasp falling from his lips.
“Let me do this,” she murmurs in his ear, wishing it to sound sexy and fevered and experienced.
“Oh, Rey.”
He’s on her again, tongue delving deep into her mouth.
A fire has been burning low in her and waiting for him to feed it for weeks now, and she feels it lap at her insides, making her thighs quiver with bridled want and frustration.
He pulls back, keeping one hand on the side of her neck.
“If there’s anything you don’t want to do—“
“Ben,” Rey says in earnest, “I really want to suck your dick right now. And if I didn’t want to, I promise I wouldn’t tell you that.”
He beams at her. They share an incredulous, juvenile giggle and sit back.
There’s an awkward fluttering moment where she watches him back up and extend his seat, the spit coating her nippple getting colder. He glances at her and then stares at the car ceiling until he’s settled in a better position.
“Your turn,” he gestures at her seat, reaching for her. “Wait, I’ll do it for you because—“
“No no, it’s okay,” Rey unbuckles her seatbelt and turns around swiftly. “I think I got the gist of it, I’ll do it and then—“
“But if you—“
Her hand flies between her seat and the door, and she doesn’t really know what she’s looking for, and she’s flustered and about to give her first blow job in years — second total — in a car older than the world, and before Ben can finish his sentence, the passenger sit dips back, hitting the back seat with an ominous creak.
“Oh,” Rey croaks, dumbfounded. “Shit, shit, sorry, I should have…”
“It’s okay. You couldn’t have known, she’s a very old lady. Here, I’ll just—“ Ben extends his upper body over her, hand pulling at the lever and gets her seat back up, not without giving her a great show of his bicep bulging. Then, his arm snakes between her feet, pulls at something and her seat slides backwards.
They shuffle to rearrange themselves. One of her tits is still out and she feels slightly mortified— but Ben looks over at her, tilting her chin towards him with two fingers and says, “Hey. You’re fine. We don’t have to do anything if you don’t feel like it,” and she gives him a shy grin as he tucks the curtain of her hair behind her ear, and yeah, this guy still deserves a bit of inexperienced dick sucking on a deserted rest area.
“I haven’t done this in a while,” she murmurs, grabbing his hand. Ben runs his thumb over each of her knuckles.
“Me neither.”
“I’m not even sure— the logistics of it are kind of, uh, blurry to me.”
“There’s no logistics. It’s just me and you.” He brings her hand to his lips, and gives it a long kiss, tongue grazing at her vein there. “Do you want to?”
He doesn’t look mad that she fucked up the flow of the moment, doesn’t look pressing in his question— and she knows, despite the bulge she sees in his shorts and the red blooming at his neck and chest, she knows he’ll be satisfied with any answer she gives him.
“Yes,” she breathes. “I really want to. Do you?”
Something different moves across his traits, a darkness.
His hand cups the back of her head and brings her to his lips, and the second they touch, she feels herself melting against him, clawing at his chest to stay afloat.
He says it in the kiss, between her lips in his teeth and his tongue tracing the seam of her lips, yesyesyesyes. Vibrating into her mouth and reaching deep inside her, the vastness of what he’s been holding inside this whole time pours into her own desire for him.
There may be a science to doing things at the right time, right place — but she’s glad they got it all backwards the first time.
It makes nipping his jaw and neck, burying her tongue in the hollow of his throat all the more exciting and new.
Ben’s shirt comes off easily, the movement of his hand ending at her nape as he undoes the tie there, revealing her tits to him. She feels her nipples tighten, remembering the way his mouth felt suckling them.
She kisses her way down his chest with as much patience as she can gather. No mole or mark remains untouched, one of her hands gripping his shoulder for balance and the other traveling down the plane of his stomach, getting lost where he’s warm and hairy and soft.
Her upper body’s bent at a strange angle, one of her legs pressed on the seat and the other on the passenger seat floorboard. She’ll have to rearrange her limbs at some point, but Ben’s head hits the headrest and his hand searches for her nipples to pinch them, and it is worth the numb tingling in her bent leg.
She sucks a searing kiss into his navel, one hand ghosting over the hard bulge at the front of his shorts.
“F-fuck. Let me— let me just get this off,” he utters and reaches for his zipper.
She covers his hand with hers, looking at him intently.
“I wanna do it.”
The skin on his neck prickles. He grabs her at either side of her jaw. His lips brush against hers, slow and tender, contrasting the grip he has on her.
She scrambles to find his zipper, lost in his kiss, and tugs down the waistband of his shorts and swimsuit together. She swallows back a gasp of surprise as she looks down to his lap.
He’d felt big a year ago but she was drunk and sad and he’d fucked her so sweetly she didn’t remember him as long and thick as he is now.
With a slight tremor in her hand, she traces the underside of his head with her thumb. His hips jerk forward slightly. She lets go of him and looks up, a twinge of panic twisting at her throat.
“Sorry, sorry. Um.”
Ben smiles and cups her cheek. “You’re doing good. Do you want me to show you what I like?”
She nods, watching him lay back on his seat and grab himself at the base, fist resting on the coarse hair there. He glides his hand up, over a creamy bead of pre-cum, then down.
He pumps himself a few times, unhurried. She’s fascinated by the sight of him, each motion directly coursing through her veins, pulling at her nipples and clit.
That has to be the hottest thing she’s ever seen.
She wonders if he felt like this watching her touch herself. She wonders if he’ll let her watch him again, in her bed or his or wherever and whenever he does that.
His hand comes to rest on her cheek again, and he pushes his thumb inside her mouth. He touches her this way, finger sliding in and out, caressing the soft wetness of her cheeks, her tongue. His mouth falls open when she grazes her teeth at his bone and sucks him in, to the knuckle.
“Oh, God,” she whines around his thumb.
“Here, give me your hand.”
He cups it palm up with his own.
“Spit.”
The direction turns her stomach upside down. She brings her mouth above her hand and a miserable drop of saliva lands in her palm. Ben chuckles, low in his chest, squeezing his cock with his other hand.
“No, like this.”
He leans forward and spits in her hand . A long string of spit adds to her own failed attempt.
“Your turn.”
She does better this time. Ben nudges her cheek with his nose. He wraps their hands around him, letting her lead with a few tentative tugs.
“Good,” he rasps. “You can go gently at first. I’ll tell you when to pick up the pace.”
She’s impossibly nervous, staring at his ruddy head popping in and out of the sheath of their joined hand. The foreskin reveals the tip of him and hides it again, and again in a slow rhythm.
But Ben, even with his breath hitching in his throat and strung-out curses slipping out, he tells her she’s good, tells her she’s perfect and she’s making him feel so fucking good.
And she desperately wants to believe him.
“You can squeeze a little— a little more, don’t be scared— yeah, just like that. Fuck. You feel so good, baby.”
He’s grabbing the passenger headrest, and she follows the bulge of his throat bobbing up and down, lips parted around raw breaths.
She brings their hands up, tries dipping her thumb as gently as she can under his foreskin. The soft part of his stomach trembles, his hips jerking and a guttural moan rips out of him.
The way he looks at her, it— She has no fucking clue what she’s doing, and yet, his eyes, wild and dark, they make her feel sexy and wanted, they make her want to keep trying to get these reactions out of him.
She wants it now, the feel of him on her tongue, filling her until she’s overwhelmed with his presence inside her. Fear dissolves into the desire to see him as wrecked as she feels.
“Fuck, Rey, I—“
“Can I put it in my mouth?” she asks bluntly. “I mean, can I put you— can I try putting you in my mouth?”
“Y-yeah, yes, yes please,” he nods, freeing her hand from his grip.
She shuffles in her seat to kneel across it, and rolls her bikini top down to her waist with her free hand. She bends at her waist, balancing one hand between his thighs and the other around his shoulder.
Her nose finds the hair at his base, rubs there.
He smells different, muskier. Sweat and skin. Sex.
She flattens her tongue against him, searching for the taste of the spit that slid down his length and landed there. The weight of his testicles grazes her hand, and she feels emboldened enough to flip it and cup him.
Above her, the muscles of his stomach flex again, air whooshing out of him like he’s been punched in the gut.
“Good?” she purrs, sucking a shy kiss at the base of his cock.
His fingers bury themselves in her hair.
“So good, so good, just— just please, keep going.”
“How?”
It comes out as a whine more than a question. And she kind of knows how she’s supposed to proceed next, but hearing him say it provides her with fresh waves of arousal that make up for the fact that she can’t touch herself right now.
“Kiss it. Kiss me. And then maybe, if you feel like it, you can lick—“
A ragged groan fills the enclosed space of the car as she flattens her tongue against him and licks him, base to head, in one broad stroke. She tries kissing the head once, peppers some more pecks on it just to feel his fingers tighten around her hair.
Her tongue tests the ridges of his head before her mouth closes around it. She suckles it like he did with her nipples, feeling his skin move under her tongue. Her eyes open to see the muscles of his thighs harden.
Just the thought of him refraining himself from fucking her face has her eyes flutter close again. Maybe one day.
Hopefully, one day.
The tip of her tongue pokes at his tip, slipping under his foreskin. At the same time, she wraps her free hand around the length of him.
The sound that comes out of him is everything.
It’s her doing this to Ben, no one else, just them panting in his car in the middle of fucking nowhere, and it’s everything. Her hand tightens around his balls, fondling them as she tries to find some balance and rhythm in her movements.
She does push him further in her mouth a few times, but she must be nervous still under the tightness coiling inside, because she can’t even feed herself a third of his cock until the urge to spit him back out grips her.
“Don’t go too far, baby, we’ll have time for that later, just— you feel so so good already, please, don’t worry about it,” he coos, a quiver in his voice, brushing her hair out of her face and petting her cheek gently.
Rey’s mouth releases his head with a hungry groan, lips spit-wet, and feeling herself tittering on the edge of sanity. Half-feral.
“I really, really, really wish I could touch myself right now,” she keens.
He catches her lips and she whimpers, overwhelmed by the taste of his lips and cock melting right under her tongue. Ben pushes two fingers in her mouth, cramped in the inside of her cheek, collecting wetness there, and brings them to her nipple.
He tugs sharply and Rey cries out, so flustered she feels her blood rush to her clit. She bends back down, engulfing him again.
Feeling kind of sorry she can’t offer him better than that, she focuses on sucking on his head, letting her tongue slip under his skin to graze his tip every now and then, hand fast and hard around the rest of him.
“I’ll get you home and I’ll clean you myself and then I’ll lay you on your bed and I’ll eat you out for weeks, Rey,” Ben babbles above her, kneading the soft flesh of her tits, “I’ll fuck you, and it’ll feel so good, I can’t ever not be in you after that, I swear, I promise, I’ll make it feel so good, baby—“
Sweat pools between her tits and snakes down her stomach. Her knees and back hurt like hell, and she wants to reach between her legs so badly she feels honest-to-God tears prickling at her eyes.
His promises turn into gibberish which then turn into deep, rumbling moans again, and suddenly, he grabs the base of her throat to try to pull her off him.
“Gonna come, don’t—“ he tries to warn, but Rey huffs in protest and takes him deeper than she’s managed to so far.
She doesn’t have much time to adapt to the sensation of his cum filling her mouth, bitter and hot, spits out most of it on his thigh as she pulls back and gasps for air in the same beat.
Her throat feels tight and used. She coughs in her inner arm, gaze bored to Ben’s face.
Mouth agape, breath ragged, he stares at her in awe.
He rushes forward to kiss her, swallowing her protest, “Ben, you’re all over my—“, licks into her mouth, hot and slow.
She tells herself she’s sensitive enough, crackling with suppressed energy, she could come just from this. A moan dies on his tongue.
Then, he tucks himself back in and turns around, grabbing a loose plastic bottle of water forgotten under his seat and handing it to her.
Instead of washing her mouth with the tepid liquid, she swallows long gulps, curious to let the remnants of him slide down her throat. It’s salty and bitter, tastes human and that’s it.
Ben makes her turn around to tie her bikini top. He drops small kisses to her sternum after he’s done. She cradles his head in her hands, and buries her nose in his hair. He smells like her and the car and the beach. It’s a strange combination. She inhales deeper to find Ben under the layers of alien things.
“You okay?” he asks, arranging his seat back to a comfortable driving position, then hers.
“Yeah, I think so.” Her knees have turned peony red, imprints of the seat adorn her skin, she feels oddly hungover but apart from that and a dull pain in her back, she’s fine. “Was it— did you like it, I mean, was it good for you?”
He grins. His hair is mussed and his cheeks are a beautiful shade of pink. He looks utterly, stupidly happy.
“Yeah, it was perfect. You’re perfect. I can’t believe you’re real.”
His thumb brushes over her lip. She rolls her eyes, ignoring the touch directly tugging at her further down, deeper, where she hasn’t uncoiled yet.
“Please. That was hardly a real blow job. You just cockblocked yourself to the point of delusion.”
“I’m glad I did,” he chuckles, stealing a small kiss from her lips. “That was the best non-blow job car blow job I’ve ever received.”
She’s shaky while buckling her seatbelt again and brushing over her thighs, not knowing where to put her hands. She glances at her reflection in the rearview mirror— cherry-red lips, bright eyes. Equally, stupidly happy.
“I want to get you home and in the shower, and take care of you after that. Does that sound good to you?”
He asks that casually, hand on her headrest, pulling out of a spot that’s now theirs, as corny as calling a rest area anyone’s is.
She nods, a beam blooming across her lips.
“That sounds perfect.”
Ben fills her life in ways less fleeting than before; his toothbrush next to hers, flowers she buys for him on shelves Kylo can’t reach, their phones charging on top of the other at night, matching pairs of sandals by the door.
It’s easy this time, painless.
She feels herself opening up, budding velvet-soft carvings meant for him to fit into. Not that it had been before, but— she’s always surprised that Ben’s presence is not smothering her in the slightest.
He calls, first once a week and then, once she allows herself to be taken on a second date, every three days (tells her about his day and the silly things people do on the train and would she prefer lamb or veggies for next Friday?).
And on the cusp of August and September, there’s no need to call anymore. Plans for the next day are made before they go to sleep, her sprawled next to him with her precious fan blowing in their direction under a thick layer of late summer heat.
But he calls her, still.
Right as he’s said goodbye and kissed her, buried between her pillows, sleep-drunk and blissful to have half an hour of commute on him, he calls. “Just to hear your voice,” he says, his still gravelly. The image of him with his damp hair and cool-guy crossbody bag, giddy enough he’d do something as unchaste as telling her he misses her with morning rush buzzing around him soothes old aches in her heart.
“I’m with Kylo. He wants to talk. Business as usual I presume,” around the time she leaves work, which turns into twenty-minute retellings of lunch options at daycare, the latest ways of torturing the ants who live by the tricycles him and his friends have come up with; and then diverts their plans, she’ll come to his instead, and does he need coconut cream or milk, and this bus is on an alternative route, she’ll have to wait for the next.
He’s warm and welcoming in the whirlwind of newness she’s experiencing.
Life coming to her a second time, a better time now that she’s seen herself at her worst; and in the midst of it, finding her way to him, not a refuge but something even dearer.