Page 13 of Habibi: Always and Forever
NOVA & MOON
I come awake with a scream trapped behind clenched teeth, pain shooting through my jaw, bone-hinges resisting the pressure on instinct.
Cold sweat soaks my naked back and chest as well as the bedding, the sudden, stark discomfort now depressingly familiar.
In contrast to the cool droplets soiling the bedsheet, the room is filled with a clammy heat that feels suffocating to my overwrought lungs.
Rex stirs to my left, turning over onto his side and blinking up at me with sleep-swollen eyes.
In the darkness of our bedroom, the bright, pale blue of his irises almost seem to glow like an alley-cat’s.
With his messy, white-blond hair, pert little nose and, at times, imperious attitude, Rex makes me think of an expensive, pure-bred house cat who wandered away from home one day and got himself recruited into a stray dog pack.
I let the sight of those pretty eyes lull my racing heart back to a calmer drop-beat, raising a shaky a hand to run fingers through my damp, matted hair and counting every inhale and exhale in a bid to regulate my breathing back to something close to steady.
Rex half sits up, resting his weight on one elbow and reaching for me with his other arm.
He hesitates before he touches me, waiting for permission.
After all these years together, he knows that sometimes I don’t like to be touched after a night terror, that physical contact, even from him, can make me feel as if I’ve been flayed open, my every weak spot irrevocably exposed like nerves ripped right out of their hiding place beneath my skin, the underside of my flesh itching like termites are chewing at it with their razor little teeth.
I lean sideways, brushing my bicep against his hand, hung in mid-air, a bird without a perch.
Rex closes his pale, slim fingers around my arm, blunt nails digging in just hard enough for me to feel the soft bite of them.
He squeezes once, twice, communicating a non-verbal question.
A simple “Ok?” without needing to speak it aloud and break the oddly comforting quiet of the night.
It’s grounding, his distinct touch a reminder of who I’m in bed with, of who I am when I’m with him.
Empathy is splayed across Rex’s face as he looks up at me through dark lashes. His hair is a mess from sleep and there are bruises under his eyes that remind me of how little rest he’s been getting lately.
Guilt clenches in my gut. He’s not been sleeping much because of me, because of my near-constant nightmares plaguing my—our—nights.
But even when mildly exhausted, Rex still looks so beautiful, too beautiful, almost divine.
Almost, because of his imperfections. Not just the bags and the disastrous hair, but the myriad of silver scars on his slim, pale body from years of battling supervillains and the chipped incisor from when he was sparing with Mei and she accidentally send him flying out of the ring.
He’s cracked and delicate, but wicked sharp and unfathomably strong too, like smashed glass encased in glittering diamond.
Rex is an angel, but a fallen one. Lucifer, free from his cage, a temptation and a heavenly warrior, bound into the same deceptively breakable form.
Suddenly captivated by the severe jut of his collarbone, I drop my face down to press a kiss to the juncture between his neck and shoulder.
He gasps at the feel of my lips on his sleep-warm skin, the sound too loud in the silent room and entirely welcome.
My tongue licks out just far enough to run the tip across the expanse of his pulse point, stopping at the edge of his jaw to scrap my teeth against his skin there.
Rex lets me raise myself over him, shifting around and widening his legs so I can climb between them and press him back into the mattress.
He lays down again easily, accepting the change in mood without pause or question, allowing me this, the peace and bliss that comes alongside loving him with my body when all my mind wants to do is show me the horrors of my past.
We learnt early on in our relationship that Rex likes the size difference between us.
He likes being crushed under me, smothered by my heat and muscle.
He admitted to me, once, and only once, because Rex is not often soft or intimate, especially not verbally, that curling up beneath me, caught and unable to escape, is the safest place in the world to him.
I had to hide how that warmed me from the inside out, like a fire sparked to life in the core of my chest, otherwise he would have balked at it and said something scathing to balance out the sweetness.
When we first started having sex, I was worried about hurting him, pushing too hard and wanting too much, the clawing monster inside my gut snarling at me to pin Rex down and fuck him until he wouldn’t be able to feel anything other than my cock splitting him open.
It scared me, just a bit, how much I craved him, this mean little nightmare who came out of nowhere and dug his sharp kitten claws in between my ribs to scratch his name on the delicate flesh of my heart.
But Rex proved himself far more durable than I could have imagined, and after a few tentative, slow fucks, he demanded I stop holding out on him and fuck him properly, like I really meant it, like I wanted to mark him permanently with my bruises and come, like I’d kill and die just to be inside him.
Rex was very specific about it, which was a bit worrying, considering the fact he was laying out all my own thoughts and desires as if he stole them from my head under the cover of darkness for the sole purpose of presenting them to me like he’s stumbled upon them by accident, leading me to believe he’s a witch of some sort as well as a prince.
He’s half a fairy tale cast, both hero and villain.
I press my mouth to Rex’s in a fiercely possessive kiss and align our cocks, ready to thrust against him, intent on drawing out those sweet, mewling noises from his throat that I’ve become undeniably addicted to.
One day I’ll convince him to let me record his primal, needy little whines so I can listen to them on repeat all day.
Rex snakes his arms around me and digs his fingernails into my back, raking them down my sweat soaked skin when I roll my hips and grind my cock against his, both of us hard as nails already, the anticipation, expectation, of what’s coming enough to bring our lust to the surface, prepared to breach and spread like fire across a river of oil.
“Come on, Jay,” Rex pants against my spit-slick mouth, “love me how you know I like it. I want to feel you. I want to feel so much of you that there’s no room left for anything else.”
I groan loudly into his neck, thrusting again, hard, giving him what he’s asking for, so gone for him that refusing seems like a foreign concept, too arcane a thing to even consider.
Rex shifts, his intent clear as he pushes up the bed and reaches between us to grab hold of my cock.
He presses the tip of it to his arsehole, encouraging me to breach that tight ring of muscle and spear him on my weeping erection.
Still slick and loose from when we fucked earlier in the evening, I thrust into him in one smooth jerk of my hips, Rex’s guiding hand aiding the easy glide.
Impatient as ever when it comes to sex, Rex wraps his legs tightly around me and tugs me deeper into him.
He doesn’t hesitate to take me, ignoring any remnant of discomfort or pain.
He gasps and I swallow it with my next kiss, licking into his mouth and sucking on his tongue whilst I get myself started on a punishing rhythm thrusting in and out of his hole.
All the pleasure that comes from rolling my hips into him becomes a magnetic force, pulling me back again and again, my cock greedy fill to Rex’s hole and burrow in further and further each time.
I push in with a little extra force, battering up against Rex’s limits, eager to break through them and make him lose his mind.
Rex arches under me with a harsh mewl when my cock drags across his prostate.
“You’re so fucking gorgeous,” I murmur hotly into the skin of his bared throat, eliciting a full body quake from Rex.
Now I have the right angle, I’m able to hammer my cock against his prostate, and Rex loses whatever control he previously held onto.
He trembles and writhes, at once clinging to me and thrashing around like an animal caught in a trap, one he willingly clambered into.
His desperation only fuels the fire inside me, the predator that lurks beneath the surface of my skin snarling in victory, demanding that I pin his smaller body to the bed and take everything from him he’s willing to give and more.
“Sometimes,” I whisper to him darkly. “I look at you and I think that all I want to do is keep you here, in our bed, safe and warm and beautiful and aching for me to fill you up and take you apart.”
Rex tightens his slim legs around my waist and squeezes me so hard it’s almost painful.
It feels like approval, and I’m suddenly hit with the desire to tell him everything, all the scary, too much, obsessive crap I’m usually too afraid of saying in case it drives him away.
I plant my hands on either side of his head and look down at him, drinking in the hungry, brightness of his gaze.
With those eyes, he promises me that he won’t leave, that he won’t run from this, no matter what I do, no matter how insane we make each other feel, constantly on the edge of a pain so brutally sharp it could cut us up into bloodied pieces no one would recognise afterwards.
“You’re so pretty and tiny and mine ,” I rasp, overcome by how much I want him, how much I always, always want him.
“But, fucking hell, you’re strong too. Stronger than me.
Stronger than anyone I’ve ever met.” I don’t slow my thrusts as I talk, instead ramping them up until I’m barely able to speak with the exertion of fucking him.
“I never knew it was…possible to love someone like this, like…like I was fucking born to do it ….I…I look at you and…all I can think is…this… this is why I’m here. ”
Rex doesn’t falter, doesn’t ask to stop or take a breath. He just holds on, staring up at me like I’m his whole world, the only thing he can see, the only thing that matters.
It won’t last, it can’t. Rex could never lose himself in me, it just isn’t in his nature. But he’s willing to give me this, this moment, to bask in the fantasy that I’m his everything the same way he’s mine.
When I come inside him, Rex takes it all, the heat and essence of me filling him up, marking the claim he allows me to have.
Once my heart has stopped racing quite so dangerously, I fight through my exhaustion and move down the bed to suck Rex’s leaking cock, swallowing him down my throat again and again, until he comes with shout that sounds like it was torn out of him.
I leave the room to get a wet towel to clean us both up, and then we lie together in our bed, curled up and entwined like vines climbing up the side of a house.
Sometimes, when we fuck and it’s as intense as that, which is often, I become a little melancholy after. I can’t help but think, while I have him held tightly in my arms, what it would feel like of he wasn’t. How would it feel to lose him?
I wonder if I would survive it, and then I stop wondering because I know the answer, that I wouldn’t. At least, not this version of myself. I’d become someone else, darker and harder, less easy to love and be loved.
Rex has left fissures across my soul, little rips that wept red and gold. Without him, life would be less, I would be so much less. How could any person be whole again when their other half has been torn away?
“Hey,” Rex says, lightly smacking my chest. “Stop thinking like that.”
“Like what?” I ask, feigning ignorance.
Rex smacks me again, a little harder this time. “You aren’t going to lose me, Jamie.”
My arms tighten around him instinctively at those thoughts being spoken aloud. Nightmares brought to life.
“Don’t know how I’d react if I did,” I lie.
“You won’t ever have to find out,” Rex promises, which is its own sort of lie. He can’t know that any more than I can, especially not with the lives we lead.
Still, I press a soft kiss to his hair and hope with every breath and beat of my heart that he’s right.