Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

“Rey!” She jumped as a fist pounded insistently against the door. “Open up!”

Rationally she knew that it must be someone she knew, it couldn’t be a serial killer who happened to know her name and who had sought her out in the wilderness in a blizzard. But still she sat frozen, heart galloping.

“Rey!” The voice was muffled—probably by a balaclava or a scarf. But male. Definitely male. “Open the damn door!”

It sounded oddly like someone that she knew it couldn’t be, because he was on leave, he wasn’t due back for another couple weeks, and anyway, why would he have braved the trip in this storm?

“It’s me!” he hollered. Then, after a pause... “It’s Ben!”

So not a serial killer, at least. Unless Ben had come to kill her, which, actually, she couldn’t be 100% sure that he hadn’t. She was never 100% sure about anything when it came to him. “What the hell are you doing here?” she yelled through the door. “Go away!”

“Rey?” He pounded the door again, so loudly that she jumped.

She scowled as she hastily unbolted the door and opened it just wide enough to stick her face through the opening. “What the hell are you doing here?” she repeated, straining to be heard over the howling wind.

He was wearing outerwear that was designed by NASA engineers for this weather precisely—it was probably four figures’ worth of the exact outerwear that Everest climbers use. She was wearing a turtleneck and a cardigan that Rose had knitted, mittens, and tights under sweatpants that had a hole in the knee.

“Get in,” he demanded, and only then did she notice the heavy-duty all-terrain SUV behind him—parked at least partly on the grass, she was sure despite the snow accumulation, because the gravel driveway definitely wasn’t wide enough for it.

“What are you talking about?”

“You’re not staying here in this storm. Get in.”

“You’re letting all the warm air out! Go away!”

“There is no warm air farther than a foot away from the stove. I’m taking you to a motel.”

“Like hell you are! Why are you even here?”

“Rey, there are times you’re allowed to be stubborn, and this is not one of them. Pack up whatever you need, but in three minutes you’re going to be in this goddamn car.”

She slammed the door, because it really was frigid, and because he deserved to have the door slammed in his face for being so presumptuous as to drive there in a blizzard and order her like a child to get in his stupidly expensive, well-equipped SUV thing. But the wind picked that exact moment to intensify, and a tree branch knocked repeatedly against the side of the cabin, making her jump, and the uninsulated window let in the air almost as freely as if it were wide open, and she could make it through the storm here if she had to, but given that Ben was here anyway...

Another deafening pound to the door. “Two minutes!”

“Fine!” she snapped, even though she knew he couldn’t hear her, and pulled out her suitcase from under the saggy mattress and started throwing some things in it. She hastily doused the fire in the wood-burning stove—she wouldn’t come back to a burned-down cabin, at least. She zipped up the bag, took a final look around, and opened the door, unprepared for how the wind caught it and tried to throw it in her face. She stepped out and wrestled the door shut, locked it, and trudged through the near-horizontally blowing snow to the waiting vehicle. Ben was already inside.

She clambered in, maneuvered her bag onto the floor between her feet, and pulled the passenger door shut.

He glanced over at her and sniffed by way of welcome. He impatiently jabbed at the heat button to turn it all the way up, so the equivalent of a desert blasted toward Rey’s face. She didn’t complain. She didn’t want to give him the satisfaction.

The engine turned over and he checked the rear view mirror before backing out, though who would be behind him in this weather she couldn’t imagine. It was unimaginable enough that he was here.

“Why are you here?” she demanded.

After an unreasonably long pause, he grunted. Then another pause.

She took it that was all the answer she could expect. “Where are we going?”

He sniffed. “Motel.”

She rolled her eyes. “You said that. Where?”

“Allentown.”

She tried to remember the little towns she’d come through on the way. “That’s what, half an hour away?”

“In good weather,” he grunted curtly.

“So in this, what? An hour and a half?”

“At least.” He scowled at the road and gripped the steering wheel tighter.

“I didn’t ask you to come, you know,” she snapped.

He scoffed.

“So you don’t get to be mad at me.” She crossed her arms as if she’d made a point.

He didn’t argue, at least.

They didn’t talk after that. Ben navigated the sea of swirling white with laser focus, taking his eyes away from the windshield being frantically wiped only long enough to glance at the GPS intermittently. Rey peeled off her mittens but didn’t trust herself to remove her coat without flapping the arm onto his side, and she refused to give him another reason to be a jerk, so she sat there and sweated underneath all her layers as the heated seats conspired with the blasting heat to make her uncomfortably hot.

Her phone was somewhere in the bag at her feet, and even if she extracted it she wouldn’t have a signal, so there was nothing for her to do besides fiddle with her cuffs and sweat and look out the window at a wall of white nothingness.

Ben cursed under his breath as the visibility decreased even more. They slowed nearly to a crawl as he advanced only the few scant feet at a time that he could see.

He needed all his concentration to drive, so she really shouldn’t have said what she said, defensively: “You didn’t have to come.”

He was silent for long enough that she didn’t think he was going to answer. And when he did, it was mostly under his breath, like he wasn’t even saying it to her, just himself.

She didn’t catch it.

The snow was falling faster than the salt that had probably been deposited on the highway hours ago could melt it, and the lane divider lines were now long unbroken lines of white. The ridiculous SUV thing was handling the conditions quite well—she had to give it that—not so much as a single slide. But that didn’t change the fact that the visibility wasn’t getting any better, it was already getting dark, and soon night would make their route even more treacherous, lowering the temperature of the road and allowing for even more accumulation. Every muscle in Rey’s body was clenched tight, as if she were the one driving, as if she could do anything to keep the vehicle in control if something happened. She glanced over at the GPS.

“Five miles,” she informed Ben tensely.

He grunted, blinking at a bead of sweat that rolled into his right eye.

“Almost there.” She didn’t know why she suddenly felt the urge to praise him, to spur him on and comfort him, like she’d asked for this. Like she’d wanted to make this treacherous journey with him inside of staying snug in her cabin and feeding the fire. “You’re doing good.”

He blinked hard, and spared a quarter-second glance away from the road in her direction.

“We’re almost there.”

Maybe if she said it enough times it would be true; this interminable trek through a swirling sea of snow would end.

We’re almost there. We’re almost there.

The neon of the motel sign glowed through the blizzard. The parking lot hadn’t been cleared or treated for the snow, so the piled-up snow compacted in a complaining, cottony crunch beneath the tires. There were only a handful of other vehicles in the parking lot—all rapidly being buried in snow—and only one of note: a charter bus.

Ben shifted into park and looked over at her. “You okay?”

Aside from a nagging ache between her shoulder blades from the tension of the past two hours… “Fine. You?”

He grunted, which he seemed to regard routinely as an acceptable response, and it wasn’t, and she would tell him so if they weren’t sitting in an SUV in a blizzard. She grabbed the handle of her bag, and he took the keys out of the ignition, grabbed his phone from its mount, and reached into the back seat to retrieve his own much-bigger bag.

“Ready?” he asked.

“Yep.”

The wind hit her like a frozen slap as she pushed the door open, and she wasted no time in clambering out, heaving the fraying strap of her bag over her shoulder, and shutting the door behind her. The trudge toward the glow of the fluorescent-lit office was probably no more than twenty feet, but it felt like much longer with the way the snow sucked her boots in and resisted letting go. Ben reached the door just ahead of her and yanked it open, plowing the drift forming at its base to one side.

Rey slipped by and he followed, hefting his bag through behind him. The door shut with a clang from the cowbell lashed to its handle with string.

Rey stomped her boots moderately dry on the rug, scraping the sides of the soles awkwardly and dusting off her shoulders. She could feel her cheeks glow red from the sudden transition from cold to warmth. She unwound her scarf from her neck, wincing at how the wool had plastered to her skin with sweat.

Beside her, Ben had done some of the same preparations, but he’d finished in time to be at the desk by the time a woman came shuffling out from the office behind the desk.

“We need two rooms, please.”

The clerk—a nondescript, mousy-looking middle-aged woman with no particular identifying features besides her exceptional blandness—answered with a drawl, “I don’t have two rooms for ya.”

“There must be a mistake. I called earlier this afternoon.”

“Earlier on I hed two rooms. Then th’ bus came,” she said placidly, jerking her head in the direction of the charter bus parked outside. “On their way home from a cheerleading convention or some such. Didn’ expect the storm to come up as quickly as it did.”

“When I called this afternoon,” Ben said, in a voice Rey could tell he was struggling to keep calm and even, “I was given to understand that I could expect the use of two rooms.”

The woman stared back, unruffled. “That was before th’ bus came.” From her general demeanor, Rey wasn’t entirely sure that she was even familiar with the concept of reservations.

“Are you full up, then?” Rey cut in before Ben could make matters worse.

“Weeelllll, let’s see,” the woman said, shuffling over to a boxy computer that has probably been new in Clinton’s first term. She clacked a couple keys and hummed to herself. She clacked a couple more for good measure. “There’s 19.”

“Room 19?” Rey asked in a slight panic. “Just one room?”

“It’s on the end,” the woman offered, seemingly by way of explanation.

“And that’s the only room free?” Rey asked again.

“Mos’ people won’ take it. It’s too far from the innernet, it won’ work down there. And all those smartphones and such don’ do so well here.”

“We don’t need Internet,” Ben interjected. “We’ll take the room.”

The woman turned around to fetch the room key, and Rey hefted her bag onto her shoulder again, making a mental note to murder Ben in his sleep for putting her in this absurd situation.

He quickly scribbled whatever was needed on the paper form the woman pushed his way, and seconds later they were bundled up again and on their way back out the door with instructions to turn left and go all the way to the last door.

The motel had a slight overhang over the sidewalk hugging the building, but it wasn’t doing anything against the blinding wind, and the building itself was providing a surface for the wind to hurl snow against, so drifts were building up in graceful half-parabolas in the places undisturbed by quickly-disappearing footprints made by the occupants of the rooms. Rey was walking ahead of Ben, which wasn’t the most practical configuration given how much easier it would be for his longer limbs to break a path, but she gritted her teeth and plowed through, because after all, anything he could do, so could she, and if it weren’t for him she would be self-sufficient in her cabin, and she didn’t ask him to come.

They finally reached the last door in the line, and Ben’s fingers fumbled to fit the key in the lock for a few seconds before he slid it in and pressed down on the handle to open the door. He didn’t swing it all the way open, trying not to let the knee-high snowdrift tumble into the room, but the top part of it did anyway, and he apparently resigned himself to the fact of a snowy entryway and lifted his bag in with him, holding the door open for her to do the same. She flipped on the light switch while he scraped some of the snow back outside with the edge of his boot, then shut the door with an emphatic thud.

Rey let the strap of her bag slip off her shoulder and sighed, extricating herself from her scarf and coat. She draped them over top the long, low chest of drawers that was also serving as a TV stand and toed off her boots with difficulty. Ben was investigating the thermostat, apparently successfully, since an overloud mechanical whir stirred to life. Rey looked at her cherry-red cheeks and nose in the mirror for a few seconds, and since Ben was still bent over the heater by the window, she decided she might as well make herself comfortable. “I’m going to take a shower,” she announced curtly, and he grunted in acknowledgement.

She didn’t want to bring her bag into the bathroom and track snow farther than it had already been tracked, so she rummaged through it to retrieve pajama pants, underwear, and a sweatshirt. She secured them under her armpit and headed to the bathroom, hoping it would have one of those cheap soaps wrapped in paper like a present from someone who had run out of tape. It did, and a minuscule bottle of two-in-one shampoo and conditioner, too, that she assumed Ben would never deign to use, so she commandeered it.

She turned the shower on all the way to hot and balanced her clean clothes on the edge of the tiny sink. She stripped out of her sweat-dampened clothes, used the toilet, and waved a hand under the shower’s stream to check its temperature. It was mercifully scalding. She turned the handle just a little, so the water would leave her skin lobster-red but not blistering, and stepped in. She moaned aloud when the water enveloped her, and she just stood there for a long and wasteful minute, letting the cascade find all of her skin. Finally she grabbed the soap and made quick work of running it all over. She decided to save the shampoo for another time, but still let her hair get rinsed through. When she shut the shower off and tugged open the curtain on its rusty rail, the bathroom billowed with steam that the feeble exhaust fan did little to disturb. She grabbed a worn, scratchy towel, dried herself off, and twisted her hair up into a vanilla ice cream swirl atop her head. She pulled on her clothes reluctantly, grimacing as the humidity made them stick, and opened the bathroom door to let in some cooler, drier air. Her discarded clothes she bundled up into a pile that she dropped in the corner of the carpet outside the bathroom. She should hang them up to dry, but the luxury of a thermostat and a scalding shower made her lazy.

She looked over at Ben, and had to do a double-take, because... “You’re cooking.”

He looked over at her for a second, then quickly back at the pot of soup (stew?) he had rigged up over a sterno can. “Not cooking, just heating.”

“You brought sterno. In your bag. And soup.”

He stirred the pot. “Yes.”

“Why?”

“It’s dinner time.”

“Why are you here?”

He ignored her and spooned a serving of soup into a camping mug, then held it out to her. “Here. There’re crackers on the bedside table.”

“No.” She crossed her arms stubbornly. “You don’t get to just show up in the middle of a fucking blizzard, and make me come with you, and set up a sterno can in a motel room, and—”

“Eat first,” he interrupted. “Yell at me after.”

She pursed her lips, ready to lay into him, but her stomach chose that moment to grumble loudly, and there was no way to save her pride anyway, so she stomped over to him, snatched the cup from his outstretched hand, and retreated to one of the beds, where she plonked down, crossed her legs, and glowered while she slurped a spoonful of soup in what she hoped was an obnoxious enough way to sufficiently communicate her protest.

He was still bent over the pot, back to her, except... the mirror on the wall over the chest of drawers caught just the edge of his face and bounced it back to Rey, and so she saw it when he had the gall to smile at her slurp. She humphed under her breath, grabbed a cracker from the sleeve of them that he’d put by the lamp on the bedside table between the beds, and munched it greedily. She took another spoonful of soup, and she could really use some water too, but then she looked up and he was there, holding a bottle out to her, and she grabbed it with a grunt that he could interpret as thanks if he wanted to. She twisted the cap off and slurped the water in deep gulps, then shoved another cracker in her mouth and chased it with a spoonful of soup—some concoction of hearty broth with vegetables, beans, and pasta. She glanced up to find him standing to eat his own mug.

“You’re allowed to sit down,” she glowered.

“I don’t want to get the bedspread dirty.”

Rey glanced skeptically at the bedspread opposite her, wondering if had ever been washed. “It’ll survive.”

“I’m going to shower first.” He took another gulp of soup.

“I’m surprised you didn’t bring a clean bedspread in that bag,” she observed drily.

His eyes crinkled at the edges, but she couldn’t see if he was really smiling, because he was drinking soup from the mug. “It didn’t have space, what with all the sterno.”

“And soup,” she reminded him.

“And soup,” he agreed, tilting the mug up to his mouth once more to capture the dregs. He set it down and grabbed his bag. “Do you want the bathroom before I shower?”

“No.”

He took his bag into the bathroom with him, and she amused herself for a moment imagining how difficult it must be to fit in both his body and his bag. She stood up, dusted cracker crumbs off the front of her sweatshirt, and jammed another cracker in her mouth as she unwound her hair from the towel. She fished her hairbrush out from her bag and set at it, hacking away at the tangles that had gotten no conditioner to encourage them to surrender. She finally made it through and smushed her hair between the towel again, coaxing out as much moisture as she could. She was left with a head of passably clean, neat, and damp hair, and once she opened one of the drawers underneath the TV so she could drape her towel over it to dry, she had nothing to do. She couldn’t wash the mugs and pot, since Ben was still in the bathroom, so she sat at the foot of her bed and watched herself do nothing in the mirror.

It was an unusual experience—the watching herself. Her cabin had nothing so luxurious as a wall mirror, and the “mirrors” in the communal bathroom/shower facility were really just polished sheets of metal that gave scarcely any information beyond “this is almost certainly a human face.” She looked much like she remembered—cheekbones a little more pronounced, perhaps, and a bit more sunburned, but not unrecognizable. She hadn’t slept somewhere other than the cabin in... she thought back. Ten months, or thereabouts. It was down in their contracts that they were entitled to a month off twice a year, and she was the only one who’d never used her leave. Because she didn’t have anywhere else to go.

Not like Ben. Ben, with his sporting-goods-store-model wardrobe—Ben, with his stupidly expensive SUV and his stupidly soft hair—Ben, with parents in some mansion somewhere with a plush bed waiting for him—Ben, who was just doing this to play at being poor. He’d never gone without hot water before in his life, she was certain, or had time-limited showers, or a roof that leaked when it rained, or anything other than luxury and comfort and private chefs. She wryly supposed this must be quite an adventure for him, and she was angry all over again.

He emerged from the bathroom and deposited his bag against the wall. He was wearing plaid hunter green and gray pajama pants and a heather gray t-shirt that Rey was quite sure would be sold together on the same page of an L.L. Bean catalog. And she was angry.

“Why did you come?”

“There’s a blizzard.”

“All the more reason for you to stay snug at home.”

“This is nearly as nice,” he deadpanned, glancing around the room.

“You said you would tell me after you showered.”

“No, I said you could yell at me after I showered.”

“You don’t get to just show up in the middle of a snowstorm and not even tell me why!”

He shrugged. “It looks like I did, though.”

Her hands curled themselves into fists by her sides. “Tell me.”

“You’re good with the bed closer to the window?”

“Are you seriously not going to tell me?”

“Is the temperature good, or do you want me to adjust it?”

“You’re acting like a child,” she sneered.

It was like a switch flipped. The placidity vanished; the insouciant deadpan, entirely gone. He was angry—at least as angry as her, and she didn’t know why, but at least anger was something she understood. “No, Rey, you’re acting like a child.” He advanced on her, towering taller and taller in her field of vision. “You can’t play with storms like this and you know it. What were you going to do if the stove caught the cabin on fire? Or if the snow drifts blocked off the chimney and killed you with carbon monoxide? You sure as hell wouldn’t have been able to get out to get food or water! The bathhouse is three hundred yards away, you were going to walk that in your sweatpants in a blizzard to go to the bathroom? You should’ve gone home yesterday, before the storm even started, but you’re so fucking stubborn!”

He was close, now—close enough for her to see every vein in his heavy, bloodshot eyes, and the little drops of water that clung to the tips of his hair, and the quiver of his lips and the flare of his nostrils, and she wanted to slap him but she wanted to kiss him, too—she wanted to kiss him so fucking much that her chest hurt.

They were all a little drunk, or most of them were, anyway—it was a week into their contracts, and they were celebrating over a campfire, and Poe had produced a bottle of liquor from somewhere. They passed it around the circle, Finn to Rose to Rey, talking and laughing, and it tasted awful but the glow of the fire on the ring of faces made everything sweeter, and this was as close to home as Rey had ever felt—way out here in the wilderness.

The work wasn’t easy, but she hadn’t expected it to be. Nature wasn’t easy. These people were, though, in a way that surprised her. She didn’t need to prove herself worthy of being included in their group; she simply was.

Ben was the quietest of them all. As the evening wore on, Rey half expected him to make his excuses and head back to his cabin for the night, but he stayed, taking his swig when the bottle passed his way, watching the others talk increasingly animatedly with each round of the bottle, and this was the first time she’d seen him smile, really. No one else was paying any attention to him except her, sitting across the fire from him, and the next time she drank she locked eyes with him as she lowered the bottle, and when she licked a drop off her lip it was mostly for him. And then he wasn’t smiling anymore.

They weren’t supposed to “fraternize,” technically, but it wasn’t grounds for dismissal. So she didn’t feel guilty when she took his hand in the darkness outside the ring of the dying firelight and pulled him along with her to her cabin. She didn’t feel guilty when she shut the door behind them and backed up against it. And she didn’t feel guilty when he stepped in close, so slowly, and brushed an imaginary strand of hair from her cheek and asked if she was drunk, or when she smiled and said no, or when he bent down and paused for just a moment before she pushed her lips up to meet his.

It was a good kiss. Fuck, it was a good kiss, and when she pawed at his shirt until he tugged it over his head, and when he scooped her up and she wrapped her legs around him so he could carry her the three steps to bed, that was good too. And it was so good, so much more intoxicating than the sips of liquor, when he laid them down and slid a hand up her back under her shirt and pressed her against him and rocked against her as he kissed her again and again, until one kiss slid into the next and time was measured in moans.

“Ben,” she whimpered against him, and he hummed and kissed her again, so she was emboldened to ask, “Do you want to?” and to roll her hips against his.

A deep growl rumbled somewhere in his chest, and she hooked her thumbs in her waistband, ready to shimmy out of her pants, but he said, “We shouldn’t,” and she could’ve asked why, but she didn’t want to hear the answer.

And he pressed his lips to hers one more time, slow and bitter-sweet as a last kiss, and he put his shirt back on and left, and in the morning he avoided her eyes over breakfast.

She could take a hint. It was probably for the best.

They weren’t supposed to fraternize, anyway.

Chapter Text

They stood in a panting stalemate, quiet except for the distant howl of the wind. Rey’s eyes darted down to his quivering lips, but then they snapped back up to his eyes, because she needed to say this.

“You... asshole. You can’t just fucking save people.”

“Well one of us needed to, and apparently you weren’t going to,” he snapped.

“Stop being so dramatic!” she nearly yells in exasperation. “I wasn’t going to die!”

“You don’t know that! You put yourself in an objectively unsafe situation, and I wouldn’t have had to come get you if you’d just done the reasonable thing and gone home!”

“It’s my life! You don’t get to make my decisions for me!”

“Fuck!” he yelled, so loudly that she jumped, and he ran the fingers of both hands wildly through his wet hair, inhaling sharply. “Yes! Jesus! It’s your life, Rey! You could’ve died and you know it! Or at least lost some fingers and toes to frostbite! You’re not stupid, so I don’t know why you’re acting like it!”

The tears rose in her eyes and in her throat before she could help it. “Stop yelling!”

His voice dropped in volume but lost none of its intensity. “Maybe someone needs to yell at you, Rey, because fuck, we could’ve come back to dig out the cabins after the storm and found your body, and you don’t get to do that to me.” His eyes were shining with tears of his own, and his Adam’s apple heaved with an enormous swallow.

“To you?” she asked, brought up short by confusion.

“I know I don’t have the right to...” He balled his hands into fists. “I know I don’t! But did it ever occur to you that I want it! I want the right to worry about you.” He looked away, down at the worn carpet, far from her searching, bewildered gaze.

“You picked a funny way of showing it,” she scowled. “You never talk to me. After...” she cleared her throat, but it did nothing to dispel the tight ache. “Ever since that night, you’ve gone out of your way to not have anything to do with me.”

“That’s not true,” he countered steadily, eyes fixed resolutely on the carpet, knuckles straining in his tight fists.

“It is,” she insisted stubbornly. “You always find a way out of being put on duty with me, and you don’t talk to me, and you don’t look at me, and then you just showed up out of nowhere, and I have no idea what you mean when you say you suddenly want the right to—”

“Rey.” He took her upper arms firmly in his hands, gripped tightly in a way that she would resent if he weren’t so close and his eyes weren’t burning so hotly and boring into her. “I want the right to everything, when it comes to you.” One of his hands let go of her arm to cup the side of her face, to burrow his fingertips in her hair and dig into her cheek with his thumb. “No one’s every told you how precious you are, or if they did, you didn’t believe them.”

His hands weren’t gentle, and neither was his voice—both caught her roughly and held her in his thrall. Because no, no one had told her the words that he was telling her, no one had ever cared, and even if he was angry with himself for caring, that was still something, wasn’t it? She could make a feast from scraps.

“Ben,” she pleaded through the lump in her throat, grasping urgently at his shirt over his chest with both hands, needing him to stay, even if only for a little while.

“Promise me.” His whisper was harsh and strained. “Don’t die.”

She shook her head obediently and decisively as the tears fell, and her whisper was at least as fervent as his. “Never.”

Then his mouth was on hers, hot and hard and demanding, and he was pressing her body to his so tight she could hardly breathe, but she trusted him to breathe for them both. She was crying, but he swallowed her sobs along with her moans, and he trapped her face between his two hands and kissed her cheeks, her forehead, her hair, as firm and scalding as a brand, and she was still crying when she tipped her head up in his grip so her mouth met his again, and she looped her arms under his and hooked her hands on top of his shoulders and clung to him.

“Rey,” he groaned against her skin, and broke their kiss long enough to press his cheek tightly to hers, anchoring the nape of her neck to him with one of his big, solid hands. “I was so fucking angry at you,” he swore desperately, and the hand not on her neck was around her back pinning her irrevocably to him, and she was never, ever going to die.

“I know,” she whimpered to his cheek.

“I am so angry at you.” His arm tightened almost painfully around her ribs.

“I know,” she half-sobbed, tugging savagely at his t-shirt, as if he could get any closer than he already was. “You’re allowed.”

“Rey,” he said, pulling back again to take her face in his hands. “I need you.”

She nodded over and over and bit her lip and tasted tears. “Yes.” She tried to kiss him, but he held her head too firmly.

“I’m allowed?” he asked, voice choked but quiet.

“You’re allowed.”

Then she was back in his arms again, and she didn’t know if she was crying or laughing, but she clung to him and she gave her mouth to him to baptize with his tongue.

This time when his hand slid under sweatshirt at the small of her back, there was no question, no hesitation, just a moan of despair that there were going to be a handful of seconds when they weren’t touching each other, when she raised her arms to make way for his hands sliding the hem of her sweatshirt up her sides, up her arms, over her hands, and dropped on the floor so his hands could return to the all-important task of cradling her to his chest. She nuzzled his jaw, his cheek, anointing him with her tears while his hands grew acquainted with the naked curves of her waist, her back, her spine, her shoulder blades—all spread out in a buffet that she’d been keeping warm for him for ten months.

He spun her around before her brain realized he’d done it, and his mouth was buried in her neck and his hands were grasping her waist, her stomach, her breasts, and one hand slid up past her collarbone and splayed out on her neck, and even though her head was thrown back in ecstasy, the distance was nothing to his fingertips—they stretched from her chin to the hollow at the base of her neck, and his mouth on her neck was doing things to her body that she hadn’t known something as simple as a pair of lips and a tongue could do, and she was ruined, she was entirely ruined for anyone else, and he hadn’t even taken her pajama pants off yet.

She found the hand on her stomach with one of her own and clung on to his thumb, urging him downward, beneath the waistband of her pants, and when he groaned she felt the vibration against her skin and it made her shiver violently in pleasure so sharp it was almost pain.

“Take me to bed,” she urged in a breathy murmur, and it was a command, not a suggestion, because he’d already made her wait so long, and why was he not inside her?

His fingers decided to remedy that, at least, because his hand had now made its way into her underwear, and when he found the pool of slickness waiting there for him he pressed a finger inside, and she choked out a moan and grabbed on to his forearm for dear life, and arched back into him as he impaled her.

“’S too much,” she almost sobbed, turning her head toward his so he could kiss the corner of her lips. “Need more.”

“Impossible girl,” he smiled against her mouth. “Which one is it?”

“Yessss.” Her eyes rolled back and her eyelids hung heavy.

“Maybe you’ll be able to think after you cum, hmm?”

His voice was chocolate and sin, and she nodded, though she would’ve nodded at anything. Anything that meant his finger would keep piercing her open, while his other hand curved around the bottom of her breast and his thumb worried her nipple. “Please?” she gasped out.

His hand left her breast to snake around her ribs and anchor her fast to him as his finger thrust into her, and every muscle in her body was his, to do with as he saw fit, and he saw fit to slide in a second finger with barely a pause in his rhythm, and he picked up speed until his fingers were fucking her mercilessly, and it was almost unfair how quickly her body became one breathless tremor, and he felt every twitch of every piece of her, glued as she was to his front. The first breath she found was almost a shout, and she shook against him so violently that even when his fingers quirked and slowed, and her lungs gradually remembered how they worked, still she didn’t stop trembling, muscles rippling with the lingering devastation of what he’d done to her.

He kissed her temple and gently eased his hand out of her, out of her pants, and scooped her up under her knees and carried her to bed cradled in his arms.

He had to set her down to have a hand free to pull down the bedspread and sheet, and she had just enough working muscle left to push herself up feebly to free the corner under her rear. She lay back diagonally against the pillows and pulled one of his thumbs with her, and his body followed until he was lying halfway on her.

He kissed her lower lip, slow and soft but not chaste. “I could die right now and be entirely happy,” he murmured.

She shook her head emphatically and latched on to his shirt with one hand. “If I’m not allowed to die, you’re not either.”

“Oh yeah?” he smiled quietly.

“Fair’s fair.”

“Okay.” He propped himself up on one elbow to look her full in the face, and smoothed her hair at her hairline. “I won’t die either.”

“Never?” she asked tremulously.

“Never,” he promised.

She squirmed beneath him, her body flaring back to life at the need to seal their vow in salt and skin. “Ben,” she whined urgently, grinding up against his clothed cock. She hooked one of her thumbs in the elastic of her pajama pants and underwear, trying to push them down but only succeeding in baring one hip, but he came to her rescue, tugging down the other side in concert. She flailed her legs, pushing the offending clothing down until she could finally hook onto it with one foot and push it off the other, and she could spread her knees wide, removing any barrier to her unfilled hole.

“I’m not going to be slow,” he warned, cupping the back of her head where it lay against the pillow. “And I’m not going to be gentle.”

She shivered. “I don’t want you to be.”

He fumbled with his pajama pants too, and she helped him, and together they pushed them down around his thighs but no further, and there was no time to remove something as inconsequential as a t-shirt when the thick and heavy head of his cock was nudging her entrance, smearing the evidence of her unabashed want up to her clit and down again, and he could’ve done it again, over and over, he could’ve teased her until she begged, but he’d said not slow and not gentle and the air was knocked from her lungs as he sunk into her cunt with his soul in the groan that escaped him. He didn’t wait for her to adjust, to accommodate, to stretch, because they’d been waiting ten months already, and one single second more might’ve killed them both.

His legs were bound by the barely-removed pants, but his hips rolled into her fast and forcefully, and she drew her knees up by her sides so her hole was his to use as they both needed. Her fingernails dug into his triceps even when he collapsed onto her, crushing her chest beneath the weight of his so he could find her mouth with his as his cock churned her insides and her cream streamed out.

It was intolerable how quickly she came, or how desperately, but her cries had nowhere to go besides his mouth, and he kissed the desperation right out of her as she clamped a frantic heartbeat around his cock.

“Ben,” she trembled, taking his face in both of her hands, trying to tell him with tear-soaked eyes and tingling fingertips the enormity of he’d done. What they’d done.

Her heart was swollen too big for words, though, and so was his—she could tell from the burning passion behind his kiss. She hooked her heels on the backs of his thighs, urging him on to meet her in paradise, making no effort to stifle the breathy grunts he forced out of her with his resumed thrusts.

His orgasm came chasing after hers, and it was a set of eyebrows arched almost in surprise and a guttural moan and a cock stuffed inside her as far as it could possibly go, so when he erupted the ribbons of white decorated the deepest walls of her. His hips kept rolling in a gentle reflex as he in his turn took her face in his hands and kissed her forehead and her eyelids and her mouth and fell down in a muscled heap on top of her, and even then his lips still sought her earlobe.

She lay beneath him, stroking his shoulder through his shirt and feeling the residual spasms dart through her muscles and trying to get her breath back, but this last effort was thwarted by his bulk. She nudged at his shoulder ineffectually with her hand. “You’re heavy,” she complained breathlessly.

His exhausted chuckle rumbled against her chest, and he obligingly rolled over onto his back but took her with him, so she was the one lying on him. “Better?” he asked softly, brushing her hair out of her face.

“Better,” she conceded, and nestled her nose into the side of his neck.

He stroked his fingertips up and down the length of her bare back, all the way from her neck down to the divots above her rear and back up the gentle slope.

It wasn’t necessarily good pillow talk, but she didn’t care: she couldn’t go another minute without knowing. “Why’d you say no that night?”

“Hmm.” There was a hint of a smile in his hum.

She propped her forearms up on his chest so she could look at him.

He stroked her cheek. “I couldn’t have done casual.”

“You never have casual sex?”

“I couldn’t have done casual with you.”

She smiled in spite of herself and trusted to her curtain of damp hair to hide her blush. “Am I so serious?”

“Sweetheart, when it came to you I was always going to be all or nothing, and it couldn’t be all. So nothing was the only option.”

“All?” She traced the shadow of his dimple with one soft finger.

“Yeah.” He tenderly stroked her side.

“What exactly would this all have entailed?” she pressed on, smiling.

“A lot more than you’re allowed to ask for after a week of knowing someone. And a lot more than the director would’ve been willing to turn a blind eye to. We most definitely would’ve been in violation of the fraternization policy.”

“You wanted to fraternize with me?” she teased.

“Rey.” His face was serious—not a hint of a smile. “You have no idea how badly I wanted to fraternize with you.”

She blushed and bit her lip and resisted the urge to hide her face in his neck again. “You could’ve told me. And not let me think it was me.”

He scoffs in quiet amazement. “You thought I was rejecting you?”

“You did reject me. And you avoided me after.”

“I’m sorry.” He stroked a warm, sincere thumb over her bare skin. “I didn’t realize you would care.”

She frowned. “I cared.”

“I’m sorry,” he repeated earnestly. “I thought if you knew how I felt, you couldn’t easily avoid me if I made it awkward. I didn’t want to make you uncomfortable. It seems like this job really means a lot to you.”

“Yeah.” Her vision blurred with suddenly-arrived tears. “It does mean a lot.”

“I’m glad.” He tenderly encircled her wrist with an apologetic thumb and forefinger. “Even if you like it so much that you want to stay through blizzards.”

She sniffled and smushed her face back into his neck, so when the tears leaked out, it was only his skin and the pillow that knew.

He wrapped both arms around her back and held her to him. The silence was long but not strained, not even when he finally broke it to ask in a murmur the question that the whole evening had been leading to.

“Why didn’t you go home?”

“I don’t have ‘home.’” Her voice was muffled, but it was all she had to give to someone right now, even him.

He stroked her hair while he realized things about her that she lived her whole life trying to prevent people from realizing.

She wiped the rest of the wetness from her eyes surreptitiously on the pillowcase before she rolled off of him and reached down to pull the sheet up to cover them: her fully naked and him in his t-shirt and pajama pants tangled around his thighs. She curled up on her side, close enough to kiss his shoulder.

He turned his head to look at her, even though her face was partly buried in the pillow. “I’m sorry I hurt you.”

“You didn’t know.”

“I’m sorry anyway.” He moved away from her so there was room for him to roll onto his side too, face to face.

She curled up her hand in front of her mouth. “I accept your apology.”

“You do?” he asked softly.

She nodded.

“Okay.” He smiled.

So did she.

She scooted an inch closer to him. “If you didn’t want it to be awkward, why did you tell me now?”

“Tell you that I want ‘all’? That I want the right to worry about you?”

She was sure he saw her blush this time, without her hair to hide it. “Mm hm.”

“We only have two months left on our contracts. If you want ‘nothing,’ we can pretend like tonight never happened and go our separate ways in eight weeks. And if you want ‘all,’ well...” he drew a deep inhale. “I can wait.”

“Can you?” she murmured teasingly, wiggling her naked body even closer to him under the sheet. “Can you wait to fraternize with me, Ben?”

He growled, “Well, fuck, if you put it like that...” He closed the gap between them and wrapped her up flush against him with a strong arm. He laid a slow, sweet, probing kiss on her mouth and when he finally pulled away, he said seriously, “I can wait for you. If you want.”

She put her arm around him too. “I want.”

They both lay there for a long moment, breathing each other in in the stillness. The storm gusted faintly, far away.

“We could be trapped here for days,” he murmured with a grin. “And with no Wi-fi. I wonder what we can possibly find to do.”

“Something tells me you might have some ideas,” she chortled.

“Well, cooking, for one,” he deadpanned. “Dishes too. Laundry, definitely.”

“Do you have enough cans of soup to keep us provisioned?”

“Sweetheart, I have a feast waiting for you in that bag.”

She smiled. “Keeping me well fed so you don’t have to worry about me?”

“Oh, no, I’m always going to worry about you. Now that I have permission.”

She laughed for joy until he started kissing her again, and even then, too.

It was late in the night, or maybe early in the morning, but she was trying to resist the tug of her heavy eyelids because she didn’t want to miss a second.

“Why’d you come?” she murmured once more in a sleepy slur against his bare chest.

“For this.” He gathered her even closer to him, against his heart. “I came for this.”