Page 44 of She Who Devours the Stars

I let myself collapse back fully onto the couch cushions even though it put me at maximal disadvantage; Fern loomed above, but instead of pressing down immediately, she hovered there on hands and knees watching me squirm under scrutiny.

“Why do you hesitate?” she asked, like she already knew the answer but wanted to hear me say it.

“Because this is reckless,” I breathed.

Fern tilted her head, eyes gleaming. “And?”

“And I’m going to do it anyway.”

That earned another smile, this one softer around the edges, and then Fern kissed me again, open-mouthed and hungry as myth itself. It was everything I’d expected of a mythic liplock.

This time, when she moved against me, there was no pretense: all friction and heat and deliberate intention; where our hips met, she rolled slow circles that set every nerve ending pinging distress calls straight up spinal pathways.

She advanced on me, half-predator and half lover, until I was pressed into the yielding foam of the couch, my legs parted by her thigh, my breathing shallow and fast and painfully audible. She moved with a confidence that felt older than the room, maybe older than either of us, like she’d once read every script ever written for moments like this, set them on fire, and used the ashes to dust her hands as she went about her own goddamned story.

She caught my jaw in one hand and turned my face up, tilting it so her mouth could find my throat. Her teeth grazed my skin, not gently, not politely, leaving a trail of heat that mapped out some violent new territory. She bit just below the hinge of myjaw and smiled when I shuddered, fingers digging deeper into my shoulder as if to anchor me to this reality.

Her other hand was bare against my ribs. I’d always thought of myself as impenetrable armor: all discipline, no chinks. Fern’s touch bypassed all of it, skipping the staged defenses entirely. She played me like an instrument she already knew how to break.

I made a noise that was supposed to be a protest, but came out more like a dare. She met my eyes, opened mere millimeters, and waited there, lips parted and breath deliciously sharp.

“I want you to remember this,” she said, voice low enough that only I would ever hear it. “Every time you try to play at being untouchable.” Her hand swept lower, nails raking along my side as she traced the edge of my waistband with infuriating patience. “You’re not.”

It stung because it was true.

She kissed me again, rougher now, her tongue in my mouth before I even had time to steel myself against it. The taste was electric: copper and salt and adrenaline distilled into a single impossible flavor profile. Beneath that, something else: an undertow of burnt ozone and smoke and mythic hunger that had nothing to do with chemistry or biology or any Accord-approved understanding of sex.

My body responded before I could stop it. My hands found her hips; I pulled her closer instead of pushing her away. She laughed against my lips and shifted her weight until she straddled me completely, pinning me in place with nothing but leverage and an unspoken certainty that resistance was pointless.

“Tell me to stop,” Fern whispered into the hollow below my ear.

And here’s where protocol failed entirely: I couldn’t speak. Not with words. Not without lying or betraying something I'd spent years pretending wasn’t real.

She didn’t wait for further permission. Her left hand slid between us, the zipper on my uniform pants giving way with humiliating ease, and wormed deftly beneath the last barrier between us. Her hand was cold at first (because what part of Fern wouldn’t be), but the chill vanished as soon as she pressed her palm flat against me.

She didn’t rush it; she wanted every microexpression off my face, every tremor in muscle memory, every flicker of hesitation or panic or surrender. Every time I tried to breathe, steady, or clamp down some embarrassing gasp, she did something new: dragged a nail along the inside of my thigh; pressed in slow circles until I thought I might explode from nothing but anticipation; gripped just tight enough to say “I could hurt you if I wanted” but “I won’t”. “Unless you ask nicely.”

“Say it,” she whispered again.

My brain fizzed out somewhere between pleasure and terror; all that escaped was a whimper twisted into her name.

She slipped two fingers inside me anyway, not gentle, not brutal either, but purposeful, and began to move with a rhythm designed for maximum entropy rather than comfort or romance. Her thumb worked at me too, coaxing out noises I couldn’t even recognize as mine until the whole room condensed down into three points: Fern’s hand wrecking me from below; Fern’s mouth giving orders above; and the collapsing star of need somewhere behind my navel threatening to send debris across the entire station.

She never let up; if anything, she got more relentless as I broke apart beneath her. At the end, there was a kind of white-hotannihilation that left nothing else in its wake except her name hammered into my pulse, over and over again.

I bit down on her shoulder hard enough to taste blood when I came (hers? mine? didn’t matter), legs clutching around her waist as if I let go, someone would space me immediately afterwards. Bliss hit with such violence that for a moment I couldn’t see: just pulses of mythic afterimage behind shuttered eyelids and the itch of tears leaking down both cheeks because this wasn’t supposed to happen here or ever or at all.

Fern let me ride it out. She didn’t stop moving until every last ripple had faded, and then withdrew slowly and with cruel patience. She raised her hand so I could see exactly what she’d done to me (fingers slick with evidence), then licked them clean one by one while holding eye contact like an accusation.

Then she leaned in for another kiss. Softer now, but somehow more violent for all the things not said, and let our foreheads touch in an almost-tender way before speaking again:

“You work for me now,” she whispered, lips slick with my taste. “Sexretary.”

I lay there, unable to move, unable to think, the world reduced to the electric pulse of my heart and the taste of her, and me, in my mouth.

I should have been angry. Or ashamed. Or anything at all.

But all I felt was relief. Not as a farewell, as a promise.