𑣲 Ryland Grace .ᐟ.ᐟ

“Holy… you taste so good,” he mumbles incoherently, his tongue working magic, swirling around your sensitive button, softly sucking and then lapping at it, over and over. You feel his fingers pushing inside you, your mouth falling open with a cry. With his mouth and fingers working together, you can feel your orgasm creeping closer, your core tightening each passing second.

“You’re—… you’re doing so good,” you breathe between your words, your chest rising and falling rapidly as he laps at you like a little puppy. He whimpers against you, fingers curling each time he sucks around your bud. You’re so fucking close, and it shocks you, really. You’ve never had someone get you so close so quickly, it’s as if he was made for this.

“Shit, I’m— fuck! I’m gonna—“ you squeak. He keeps the same pace, not wanting to ruin it for you. He can feel you squeezing around his fingers, fingers that are curling perfectly to his that sweet spot. Your thighs squeeze together, trapping his face against you as you start to—.

BEEP BEEP BEEP

The alarm on the bulkhead pulsed once, and it yanked you out of sleep the way a rope yanks a diver back toward the surface. Your eyes flew open to the dim amber wash of the emergency lighting, and for one disoriented, aching heartbeat you were still there. The details were already dissolving, the way dreams always did, but the feeling clung on, stubborn and hot beneath your pelvis, refusing to be reasoned away.

This made four times this week.

The centrifuge hummed, steady and utterly indifferent, simulating a gravity that suddenly felt about three times too heavy for your limbs. You lay there for a long moment, staring up at the stained ceiling panel you kept meaning to report, willing your heart to slow down. It refused. The sheets were kicked half off the bunk. Your breath was coming in short, uneven pulls that had nothing to do with the ship's air recyclers and everything to do with the very specific, very detailed place your subconscious had just dragged you. You pressed both palms flat over your face and let out a low, humiliated groan into the dark.

Get it together, you’d been telling yourself that for weeks now, and somewhere around the second time this happened, it had officially stopped working.

It was the isolation, you reasoned, dragging in a slow breath through your fingers. Months alone in the black on a one-way trip to a star twelve light-years from anything you'd ever loved, certain you were going to die frozen and forgotten before you ever reached Tau Ceti. And then you'd opened your eyes in that pod to his voice, cracked and disbelieving, telling you that you weren't alone, that he had you, that you were safe. Of course your brain had latched onto that. Of course some starved part of you had decided that safety and gratitude and him were all the same thing, twisted together until you couldn't find the seam between them anymore.

It was a good theory, but it was also fucking bullshit

You dragged yourself upright with your pulse still too fast and sat there on the edge of the bunk, face in your hands, until the worst of it finally dissipated. Through the thin bulkhead you could hear the muffled clatter of the galley two compartments over, oh, he was already up.

This morning, you needed twenty extra minutes and the coldest shower the recycler could manage before you trusted yourself within ten feet of him. You caught yourself, halfway to the shower stall, actually rehearsing what you'd say to him, as if there was any version of ”sorry, I keep dreaming about you, but it's nothing lol” that wouldn't end catastrophically. There just wasn't. There was no version of this conversation that didn't end with you never being able to look him in the eyes again, so you did the only sensible thing available to you: you said nothing, and hoped your face hadn't picked up the habit of broadcasting things you very much wanted kept private.

The galley door hissed open under your palm, and the smell of synthetic coffee hit you before anything else did. Ryland was standing at the counter with his back to you, shoulders drawn up in that particular tight line he got when he hadn't slept well, glaring at the synthesizer like it had personally wronged him. He hadn't heard the door yet.

You can do this, you told yourself, hovering just inside the threshold. Say good morning. Get your coffee. Do not, under ANY circumstances, think about his hands or his mouth.

You thought about his hands, and his mouth.

”Morning,” you managed, and your voice came out rougher than intended, still thick with sleep and everything underneath it.

He turned at the sound, and whatever he'd been about to grumble at the synthesizer seemed to evaporate on the spot. His eyes swept over you, and something flickered across his face before he visibly wrestled it back under control. It happened so fast you might have imagined it, if you weren't so relentlessly, humiliatingly attuned to every single thing that man did lately.

”Hey— hey, morning,” Ryland said, maybe too fast, and reached behind himself for the second coffee pouch without looking. ”You're up early,” he said, which was generous considering the two of you kept nearly identical hours these days. ”Couldn't sleep either?”

”Something like that,” you said, which wasn't a lie. You crossed the galley towards him, reaching past his shoulder for the mug rack.

You never figured out exactly how it happened. One second you were reaching past him for your own mug, and the next your elbow had clipped the tray in his hand and sent a half full pouch of reconstituted coffee tumbling straight down the front of his jumpsuit. The sound of it hitting the deck echoed obscenely loud in the small room. You both froze. A dark stain bloomed across the gray fabric at his hip, and for one eternal second neither of you moved, just stared down at it as though it might undo itself.

”Oh— god, I’m so sorry,” you blurted, heat rushing up your neck and into your face so fast it made you dizzy. ”I wasn't even looking, I just—“

”It's fine,” Ryland said, in the strained and careful voice of a man who had very clearly burned himself somewhere sensitive and was choosing being nonchalant over admitting it. ”It's — yep. Still hot. Good to know the synthesizer's still fully operational.”

You grabbed the nearest towel and thrust it at him, and your fingers brushed his in the handoff, barely, just a graze of skin on skin, but it went through you like a current. You snatched your hand back like you'd been the one burned.

Ryland went very still.

His eyes found yours, and for a moment he seemed very, very focused. His gaze dropped, just briefly, to the flush still climbing your throat, and you watched him clock it, watched some private calculation click over behind those blue eyes.

He knows, some panicked corner of your brain screamed. He has to know.

He didn't, of course. Couldn't possibly. But you spent the next several seconds absolutely convinced your dreams had been broadcasted straight onto your face for him to read.

”You, uh—“ He cleared his throat, mopping half-heartedly at the stain with the towel, and when he finally looked back up there was a new, careful lightness in his voice, the tone he used when he'd decided not to push. ” You okay? You look a little—,” his gaze swept over you again, slower this time, ”I don't know. Wound up?”