Archive of Our Own

“Coming!” Palamedes calls, his nervous system flooding with the adrenaline of shame as he hurriedly pulls up his sweatpants.

He cringes at the double entendre and scrambles out of bed, somehow managing to knock an empty mug off of his desk in the process. It clatters to the floor with fallen-shampoo-bottle levels of deafening drama, but remains blessedly intact. He winces at the noise and casts around the room frantically in search of something to wipe his hands on.

“Shit,” he mutters. His eyes land on an old t-shirt that hadn't quite made it into the hamper– not ideal, but it'll have to do. “Just a moment!”

He is the worst kind of asshole roommate. It's nearly two in the morning, and he really was trying to be quiet, but the sound of Camilla’s familiar knock on his door this late doesn't exactly bode well for the relative success of his efforts. This is going to be terribly awkward. He steels his nerves, gathers his wits, and factors the cost of new knives into his budget for the month. He owes her at least three new ones for the trouble.

He catches his reflection in the mirror hung on his closet door and frowns at the sight. There's nothing to be done for it, but there's simply no way that he'll be able to look her in the eye and pretend as though he wasn't touching his dick forty seconds prior. Not with his pupils this dilated, his face this flushed, his hair this wrecked.

Not that there would be much of a point in trying, seeing as she'd probably heard him through the wall and is only knocking to ask that he try and keep it down. Just a hunch, really, but it's both the most likely and the most mortifying explanation.

There's also simply no way he's going to keep her waiting. If his suspicions are correct, it'd be terribly rude, and he'd hate to add insult to injury. If his suspicions aren't correct, then there's a chance that something’s legitimately wrong. On the off chance that Cam needs his help for some reason, he can't not answer the door. He'd never forgive himself if it turned out she'd needed him and he'd been too preoccupied with his left hand to go and check on her.

Best not to catastrophize, though. Occam's razor– she's probably fine, albeit tired and mildly horrified at having overheard him through the wall. He cringes again, rubbing the heels of his hands across his misty eyes in an effort to dry them. He hopes he hasn't offended her, that she's not too upset. His stomach turns with guilt and worry at the thought of having made her uncomfortable.

Perhaps someday he'll learn how to be less of an idiot. But today is not that day, so he just answers the door instead.

Camilla is always a sight for sore eyes. But as the door swings open and she comes into view, it does not even begin to dawn on him exactly how badly he's miscalculated.

Over the years, he's seen every version and facet of her that she's deigned to share with him: the quiet, contagious sound of her laugh, the low and measured shake of her voice when she's about to cry, the faint reflexive hiss she makes when she's in pain. He recognizes which of her little tells mean she's anxious and which of them mean she's enjoying herself, knows the stories behind all her scars, is embarrassingly fond of the familiar wrinkle that forms between her brows when she's fed up with his shit.

He's never seen her quite like this, though. He can't quite place it, but something in the set of her shoulders is fundamentally unfamiliar. The thought that the girl outside his door could be a new shade of Camilla, another version of her for him to meet and learn and commit to memory, knocks him faintly off his axis.

Limned in a halo of the low yellow light that filters down the hallway from the kitchen stands Camilla Hect, her face schooled into a careful neutrality only somewhat betrayed by the dark, pensive flash of her eyes.

Stands is perhaps a little generous. She's visibly restless; more so than usual. He can tell that she's been pacing by the way she's minutely shifting her weight up and down, rocking steadily heel-to-toe in her sock feet. He takes in the restless drumming of her fingertips against the outsides of her solid thighs, the set of tracks she seems to have scuffed into the scrubby student housing carpet.

How long has she been out here? he wonders. He tries his best to swallow down the lump of nerves and white-hot embarrassment wedged high in his throat.

“Camilla,” he says, as cool and even-toned as he can manage, given the circumstances. “Everything alright?”

She blinks at him as though he's startled her, which only adds to his concern. He can't recall the last time he saw her look anything remotely close to unsettled. A guilt-shaped stone sinks to the pit of his stomach.

She's clearly dressed for bed, clad in a pair of the comfortable boxers she prefers to sleep in. She's paired them with an old debate club tee shirt of his from high school that she'd claimed as a nightshirt ages ago, the fabric worn threadbare and soft by time and innumerable wash cycles.

His still-hard dick gives an interested twitch inside his sweatpants at the sight of it, because it's a wretched and terribly embarrassing organ with a mind all its own. Camilla is, as always, an objectively attractive woman to say the least. And it's only natural that he finds the sight of his best friend wearing something of his to be a rather endearing one. And yes, granted, he's had a bit of a thing for girls in pajamas for as long as he can remember– something about their comfort, or the domesticity. Or maybe the romantic in him just appreciates the intimacy and trust of being invited to witness another person in such a raw, soft state. So he's not surprised by his body's reaction, really– just a little ashamed. It's Camilla, first of all. He needs to get a grip.

She's attempted to wrestle the top layer of her undercut into a stubby ponytail in an effort to keep her hair off her face and neck, but dark little strands have managed to escape here and there, her fringe sticking up at odd angles. There’s a hole in her left sock; he makes a mental note to darn it for her the next time he does their laundry.

She looks thoroughly bed-rumpled, but not remotely sleepy, judging by all the spare kinetic energy practically radiating off of her body. She looks as though she's spent the night tossing and turning. Maybe that's it, he thinks– she does have trouble sleeping, sometimes. Perhaps she's just come to ask him for a sleeping pill, or nudge him to scoot over until there's enough room in his twin bed for the both of them. It wouldn't be the first time.

He raises his eyebrows at her in a wordless You okay?

She opens her mouth to reply, but no words emerge. Instead, she just huffs a strangely terse, vexed little sigh and closes her mouth again, sucking her chronically-chapped lower lip between her teeth to worry at a fleck of dry skin. Her eyes dart back and forth a few times between his face and the flushed skin of his chest, a sudden reminder of the fact that he's not wearing a shirt.

It's looking increasingly as though his original fears may have been founded, a thought that makes the tips of his ears burn with shame. He dismisses the insomnia hypothesis as wishful thinking.

“...Cam?” he tries again, privately cringing at the wobble in his voice.

No response; she just stares at him with a strange and unfathomable expression of scrutiny that he doesn't quite recognize– some distant cousin of distress, or frustration, or perhaps curiosity. He closes his eyes, bracing himself against the doorframe and the weight of his own humiliation. Time to bite the bullet.

“I am. So fucking sorry?” he starts, and once he starts babbling, he can't seem to stop. “I'm assuming you heard me. If that's the case, I apologize. If not, just- forget I said anything, fuck, I'm sorry, the last thing I want is to make you uncomfortable. I really was trying to keep it down, but I guess the walls are just th-”

“Warden.”

His eyes snap back open, anxiety caught dead in its tracks by both the pet name and the amusement in her voice. “Hm?”

He watches Camilla draw herself up to her full height, shoulders back and head held high, her jaw set in the particular way that means she's made up her mind about something. Backlit by the far-off glow of the light above the stove, she's every inch a five-foot-eight monument to resolve.

The shift in her posture has the devastating consequence of pulling her (his?) shirt tighter across her breasts. The fabric is old and worn enough that it verges on translucent. It's the kind of thing that he'd normally be able to ignore, were he operating at full capacity. But as it is, he's so horrifically distracted by the shadowed outline of her nipples through thin white cotton that he manages to miss her response entirely.

He's seen Cam naked before, of course– they'd dispensed with any residual shame over changing in front of each other years ago. They’re just bodies, after all, and neither him nor Cam ever saw the point in being precious over something so pedestrian as human biology. But the thing about tits that no one ever mentions is that they're not all that different from dicks, really: a passing, flaccid glimpse in the locker room is one thing. But the alchemy of arousal has a way of transforming the sweet, comical shyness of body parts and casual nudity into something else entirely.

Which is to say, the fact of Cam possessing a pair of breasts is nothing new to him. But seeing them like this, however, her nipples drawn pebbled and dark beneath her shirt, is a first.

He tears his eyes away the second he realizes that he's being a fucking creep, but it's a second too late. The image is already burned into his mind.

Worse still, she'd caught him staring, judging by the amused set of her mouth.

“Need a hand?” she asks, with merely a minute twitch of an eyebrow and all the gravitas of someone saying please pass the salt, or a stranger stopping you to ask for the time.

It stuns him into several seconds of discombobulated silence.

She waits him out.

“...Pardon?” he sputters, with a faint squeak as his voice cracks in the middle.

“I asked if you needed a hand,” she repeats, neutral and cool, her features still schooled in that same unreadable expression, that odd mix of nerves and restless fascination. “Do you?”

She must just be fucking with him. He supposes turnabout’s fair play– he's gone and made her feel terribly awkward, she has every right to return the favor.

He blinks, shaking his head like a dog trying to clear its waterlogged ears after a bath. “Very funny, Camilla. Look, if I've upset you at all, I- “

“Exactly where in that sentence did I imply you've upset me?” she asks, tilting her head a little. “I'm genuinely curious.”

Her eyes flick down to his chest again, and for a scant fraction of a second, he almost swears he can see her gaze dart lower, and– no. Nope. He refuses to entertain that train of thought for even a moment.

He angles his hips a bit further, in the hopes that the edge of the door is effectively blocking the tent in his sweatpants from her direct line of eyesight, but with their height difference it's difficult to gauge how well it's working.

“Let's start with the part where you bothered to actually knock on my door in the middle of the night, instead of just letting yourself in like usual?” he says, as though he’s not the one currently hiding behind said door in an effort to conceal his erection, an effort that he fears only partially successful. “Offering to–”

Offering to what, exactly? He trails off, feeling the back of his neck start to prickle with nervous heat. He’s trying to deflect by sassing her, and they both know it. It's a technique that's never worked for him, historically speaking, at least not when it comes to her. But he's feeling distressingly off-kilter at the moment, so he figures it’s at least worth a shot.

“Offering to lend a hand,” she says again, in kindergarten-teacher shades of measured, patient amusement.

She takes a half-step towards him, bringing her just close enough for him to make out a stray eyelash stuck to her cheek. He goes to brush it away with his thumb without so much as a thought, reaching out as if on autopilot. He's a mere heartbeat away from touching her face when he pulls back, struck in the nick of time by the sudden, belated awareness of where his hands have been.

They're silent for a moment. Camilla tracks the motion of his hand as it recedes, eyeing him curiously through her fringe. He leans his shoulder against the doorframe and watches the steady rise and fall of her ribs through her shirt.

“Sounded like you could use one. You'd been at it a while,” she says, dry and perfunctory, as though that's not a patently insane thing to say to a person out of the blue. Camilla maintains a serviceable working knowledge of five different languages, four spoken and one signed, but clearly the language of boundaries remains as decidedly foreign as ever. Bless her.

He inhales, counting to ten inside his head as he resigns himself to both the fact that they're having this conversation, and the profound embarrassment it's sure to elicit. He exhales on a ragged sigh. There's always the witness protection program.

“Cam,” he says, his voice coming out all wretched and sheepish. “I'm sorry, I was-”

“Jerking off,” she says, characteristically blunt. “I'm aware. It's fine. If you'll notice, at no point in this conversation have I asked you to stop.”

Hearing it knocks the breath from his lungs.

“Christ,” he murmurs, scrubbing a hand over his face. “Alright. I don't, um– what's happening here, exactly?”

“I'm propositioning you,” she says, rocking back on her heels and cracking her knuckles. “For sex. You sounded frustrated. I can go, though.”

“I'd gathered that much,” he says. His voice is so strangled that he's forced to awkwardly clear his throat before he can get any more words out. “What I don't understand is why.”

She's quiet for a long moment, a silence he’s come to recognize as her taking a moment to verbalize a thought. She eventually settles on just shrugging a shoulder and offhandedly saying “You need a haircut,” like that has anything to do with the situation at hand.

“You're propositioning me for sex because I...need a haircut?” he says. “I don't follow.”

She sighs as though he's being deliberately obtuse, fixing her gaze resolutely on a patch of drywall to the left of his head.

“I'm propositioning you for sex because you severely overestimate the thickness of our wall. I've overheard you jerking off four nights a week for the past year. I can't keep doing this.” That last bit is said more to herself than to him, really, by the sound of it– not that that does anything to lessen the guilt it brings to hear her say it.

His heart sinks to his knees. “You should have told me, Cam, I had no idea. I would've–”

She holds up a palm in the universal wordless signal for stop talking and let me finish, idiot.

(He stops talking and lets her finish.)

“You've been at it for half an hour,” she continues, still intent on studying the empty patch of wall beside his door. “I can't sleep.”

He starts to apologize again, only for her to meet his eyes and fix him with a glare so piercing, so intense, that he feels a little dizzy.

“I can't sleep,” she says again, her voice gone low and dark and ferocious in its quiet. “Because I'm only human, Palamedes. You cry when you touch yourself, you know that?”

He blinks his way through the sudden shiver that comes over him, feeling his face start to heat. His dick twitches in his pants.

“What the fuck,” he murmurs to himself, flat and dazed under his breath. He knows that. He knows that intimately. In fact, it's the thing he's particularly self-conscious about, so the revelation that she evidently knows it too is kind of fucking with his head a little.

The full weight of Camilla Hect’s slate-clay eyes and her undivided attention is overwhelming– always is, always has been. But having it aimed at him like this, with that undercurrent of heated gravel in her voice, with his dick still half-hard in his sweats, with the twin brown peaks of her nipples still visible through his old shirt– it's a lot, okay? It's a lot.

She takes another step closer, deliberate and firm, the visual altogether not too dissimilar from that of a jungle cat stalking her prey.

It's at this precise moment that it finally, finally starts to dawn on him just how badly he's miscalculated; all the ways in which he's been reading her wrong.

Holy shit. He’s going to have a stroke. He is absolutely, positively going to have a fucking stroke.

“Cam,” he whispers, swallowing hard around the lump in his throat.

“Palamedes,” she says evenly, her tone and gaze softening ever so slightly towards hesitance. “Tell me to stop and I will.”

His heart hammers in his throat.

He volleys her own words back at her, because he is, if nothing else, a massive shit. “If you'll notice,” he says, slow and wry and careful, “at no point in this conversation have I asked you to stop.”

It works as intended, serving to ease just a fraction of this strange, novel tension that’s crackling like a thundercloud between them. Cam’s eyes sparkle faintly with a look of fondness and amusement that's wholly familiar, and the momentary reassurance it brings is a mutual comfort, the relief of standing on solid ground.

The very corner of her mouth lifts in a faint, knife-sharp smile. The effect is, to put it mildly, fucking devastating.

Cam's– she's hot, is the thing. He knows this, in an intellectual sort of way. She's always been perfectly lovely in his eyes, but sometime over the past few years she'd gone and grown up on him when he wasn't looking. He'd turned around one day in search of the brilliant, strong, silly girl whom he was lucky enough to call his best friend, and been met with the sight of a handsome young woman instead. Still brilliant, of course– still strong, still silly, still Camilla all the same. But something had changed, fundamentally, in how she carried herself: the warm growl of her voice, the spare and efficient way she moved, the confidence and surety in the set of her head and shoulders.

The point is– water is wet, compasses point north, Camilla’s the kind of hot that verges on excruciating if you make the mistake of thinking about it too hard. The realization just managed to sneak up on him, is all.

He's been running from it ever since.

“You cry when you touch yourself,” she says again, with that soft little smile. The effect isn't even remotely diminished hearing it the second time around. “And the walls are thin. I know it's wrong to listen. I'm sorry. I know I should have said something. I've tried to just ignore it. But I can't keep doing this. It's not sustainable.”

He offers her his own little smile as an indication that he's not upset, that he doesn't feel violated. Embarrassed, yes. Nervous, yes. But never violated. There's not a single atom of his being that Cam’s not entitled to, should she want it.

As she takes a final step closer– close enough to place a palm on his bedroom door and push, close enough for him to take a deep breath and step aside to let it swing open all the way– the unfamiliar, unfathomable aura that's been radiating off of her tonight finally slots into place and makes itself known.

Want, he thinks, as her eyes glance down at the tent in his sweatpants, as she lets her gaze linger.

This is Camilla Hect, wanting something badly enough to let herself gamble on it.

This is Camilla Hect, throwing the dice.

“It's unsustainable because I can never fall back asleep,” she says. She crosses her arms across her waist, fisting the hem of his old debate shirt in her hands. It dimly occurs to him that something wonderful might be about to happen to him, in just a moment here. “I'm too distracted lying there hearing you through the wall. Too busy trying not to picture you and failing. Too preoccupied with feeling guilty when I start getting wet.”

He sucks in a breath, swaying faintly with the force of the mental image.

Camilla chews away a smile at the corner of her mouth, evidently pleased with his reaction. She rocks a little on her feet, takes a deep breath, and drops her voice to a conspiratorial whisper.

“I'd really, really like to stop feeling guilty every time you turn me on.”

And with that, she tugs her shirt up and over her head in one swift motion, letting it fall to the carpet below as her tits drop free. The shirt lands atop her left ankle, and she kicks it aside with an irritated huff, frowning down at the scrap of cloth, her brows knitted together as though it’d personally offended her. The tableau is so quintessentially Camilla that he can't help but laugh a little, because fuck, does he love her. She's his best friend. He loves her so damn much.

The thing is, Palamedes was cursed from birth with both a photographic memory and a frighteningly effective set of compartmentalization skills.

There's a box inside his head full of snapshots of Camilla being her lovely, steady self. At present, the box is lying on its side in a pool of polaroids, the lid nowhere in sight, as a lifetime’s worth of moments recontextualize themselves in his brain, one after another like a film reel, strung together like so many pearls.

Cam, three hours deep into a finals cram session, all furrowed brows and studious focus and ambidextrous highlighting, absently blowing her bangs out of her eyes with an annoyed huff. Cam, peeling a pomegranate, sharp knife in one hand and the other stained red with juice. Cam, behind the wheel with the windows down, knowing all the words to his favorite song, her handsome and capable hands positioned responsibly at ten and two. Cam, signing his cast when he'd broken his left wrist, drawing a plain and tidy little heart by her name and tucking the pen behind his ear. Cam, on move-in day, the collar of her shirt gone damp with sweat, setting the last box down by the door before sprawling out like a starfish to catch her breath on the living room carpet. Cam, having overslept, wriggling her way gracefully into a pair of jeans as she rushes out the door, her hands full, a piece of toast held between her teeth. Cam, toweling her hair dry in her nightshirt and a pair of his boxers, droplets of water beading at her temples and collarbone, a faint smudge of toothpaste drying at the corner of her mouth. Cam, woozy on pain meds after the appendicitis and the wisdom teeth, aged seventeen and nineteen and still the exact same stubborn frown each time he'd tried to persuade her to eat another bowl of soft, bland food. Cam, throwing axes at the ren faire, the shift of her shoulder muscles beneath her shirt as she lines up each throw and the confident, self-satisfied, barely-there quirk of her lips at the sound of the blade biting deep into the cork target, dead-center. Cam, climbing into his bed, time and time again– all her wordless, shameless heron-grace, the press of her forehead between his shoulder blades, her warmth along his bare back. Cam, sat beside him on a bench outside the principal’s office, holding his hand tight in her battered knuckles and grinning at him through bloodied teeth when he'd thanked her for defending his honor– seven years old and already slaying playground-bully dragons, his steadfast, relentless knight in shining armor. Cam, opening all of his college admission letters for him when he'd been too scared, her hands decisive and sure. Cam, stretching out a sore hip flexor with the help of a resistance band and moaning faintly in relief. Cam, in a field at sunset with her sleeves rolled up, playing fetch with Dulcie's service dog, silently negotiating exchanges of slobbery tennis balls for scraps of string cheese or jerky, competent and surefooted.

At present, the box is lying on its side in a pool of polaroids, the lid nowhere in sight. All because a remarkable woman by the name of Camilla Hect decided she was done ignoring the elephant in the room, yanked the lid off the box, and kicked it over.

The very same remarkable woman who is currently standing outside his bedroom at two in the morning with both an exasperated set to her jaw and her tits out, casually propositioning him for something that could very well change their relationship permanently.

“You better not be laughing at my tits,” she grumbles, crossing her arms over her chest in a way that unfortunately hides her nipples from view, but otherwise only serves to emphasize the gorgeous give and weight of her breasts.

“I'm not laughing at your tits,” he says. “I would never. Your tits are magnificent, but we already knew this. I'm laughing because you're ridiculous, and also because I love you.”

He's been making a point of saying it more often, as of lately. He figures she could stand to hear it.

She ducks her head a little against a smile, and it's like the sun breaking through clouds.

“Camilla Hect,” he says, a hopeless grin spreading across his face. “This was premeditated, wasn't it?”

“I'll admit the shirt was a strategic choice,” she says.

“Of course it was,” he laughs. “You're horny, happens to the best of us. You're flirting with me, that's fine, if a little unexpected. But I need to be absolutely certain here: are you genuinely trying to seduce me?”

“I don't know,” she says, sweetly deadpan like the absolute pill she is, her arms still crossed and her brow furrowed. “Is it working?”

“I don't know,” he retorts, just to be a bitch. “Is it going to ruin our friendship?”

He lets his voice take on a slightly more serious, imploring note. It's important; he needs to know. His dick could hammer nails. He's at the point right now where he'd probably do any number of things if it meant he could kiss her, up to and including things like ‘walk barefoot across hot coals’ or ‘move back in with his mother’ or ‘spend twenty-four hours handcuffed to Ianthe Tridentarius’. He's a gambler by nature, but he can also recognize a point of no return when he sees it. And if there's a chance, any chance at all, that this could ruin the dynamic him and Camilla have spent a lifetime building, well– suffice it to say he has little interest in risking it.

She cracks her neck as she ponders the question, then flicks her hair out of her eyes with a toss of her head. The very tops of her breasts bounce ever-so-slightly with the transfer of momentum, and he feels his mouth start to water, which– embarrassing.

“Our friendship has managed to survive five years of me saying your name when I make myself come,” she says casually, as though this isn't a life-changing, earth-shattering piece of information, or an honor tantamount to winning a Nobel prize. “I think we'll be alright.”

Well. That's that, then. Camilla's taken this leap of faith for the both of them, and he trusts her implicitly. All that's left for him to do is follow in her wake.

“Okay. Then get in here, so I can return the favor,” he says, grinning as he takes her hand and pulls her through the door.

***

Things move pretty quickly, from there.

It's easier than it has any right to be, at least at first. He's surprised to find the most novel thing about it to be the lack of novelty: his body is well accustomed to having Camilla's body in its periphery. His skin is already familiar with the shape of her touch, the brush of her cool, dry palms. The press of her hands on his chest isn't new, either– he seldom wears a shirt to bed, and she's a cuddler, whether or not she'll admit it.

He can't even say it's the first time he's kissed her. Granted, it's been years, and there's a world of difference between exploratory adolescent fumbling for the sake of first kisses and something real, between experiments conducted in the name of crossing off developmental milestones, and... whatever it is they're doing now.

But the muscle memory of it comes roaring back all the same. He's relieved to not be starting from square one, if he's honest. The weight of her hand on the nape of his neck is just as searing as he remembers; he's just as compelled to chase the little breath of sound she makes the first time he slips her tongue. It's familiar as anything to cradle her jaw, to set a palm against the small of her back as he fits his mouth to hers.

The door is scarcely shut before she's backing him up against it. She crowds into his space with even, sure-footed steps until his shoulder blades are pressed tight to the wood. The geometry's a little different than the last time they did this– they'd been sitting on the floor of Camilla's childhood bedroom at the time, and their height difference wasn't as pronounced back then, but he cranes his neck down to kiss her and she strives up to meet him, and somewhere in the middle they manage to make it work. She's as relentless in this as she is in her fencing tournaments, which is a thought that definitely doesn't go straight to his dick, no sir, not even a little bit. He stifles a faint whine, both at the thought and at the feel of her licking hot and insistent into his mouth, and he's immediately rewarded by her resulting shiver.

Sound, he thinks. Good to know. He can work with that. He knew already that Cam liked tongue, and lots of it, but this is a minor revelation– he'd made a concerted effort to bite back his moans last time, for fear of making things weird. The realization jogs his memory, brings to mind the curious heat in her eyes when she'd said You cry when you touch yourself, you know that? He's struck with a momentary flare of nerves, because if he's wrong about this it'll be rather embarrassing, but the urge to test his newfound hunch wins out in the end. He yields to the press of her body, goes soft and pliant against the door, and makes no effort to silence the sound that rises in his throat when she sucks his lower lip between her teeth.

The reaction is instantaneous. She tightens her grip on the back of his neck, her fingertips digging into the skin like she's trying to stake a claim. She muffles a soft, low growl into the kiss, breathing a shaky inhale as she starts to nudge his legs apart with a strong thigh.

A lot of things start to make a great deal sense, all of a sudden.

“So,” he says, grinning as he pulls away to breathe. He lets his head fall back against the door with a thunk. “The crying.”

He watches as her pupils dilate, and he basks in the satisfaction of having gambled and won.

“It's aggravating,” she says, a touch defensively. “And also confusingly endearing? But mostly just aggravating.”

“Aggravating?” he asks. “How so?”

She's a sight, like this– her slate eyes glowing dark and heavy, her lips well-kissed and still shining softly with traces of his spit. Her hair’s valiantly fighting its way free of the scrubby little half-bun she wears to bed. She's far too athletic to be rendered breathless by a few minutes of kissing, but her measured inhales are slow and deep, and there's an audible tremor on the exhale.

“It sounds like you're frustrated,” she explains. “It's hard to ignore. My instinct is to help you, but I can't. It's like I said: aggravating.”

“In other words, I'm a little pathetic about it, and that makes you want to take the reins.” He feels his mouth pull into a lazy smirk as he looks her over.

He's half expecting her to reply with a dry Well, clearly someone has to, but she says nothing, which is an answer unto itself. He watches her throat work as she swallows.

“It's alright,” he offers, in hopes of encouraging her past the hesitation. “I don't mind. I actually think it's rather promising.” That's putting it lightly, really– he's starting to suspect that their respective tastes in this arena might fit together just as seamlessly as every other aspect of their lives, and the prospect is thrilling.

She still looks a touch unsure, so he offers her proof of concept in the form of a slow roll of his hips against her thigh that makes him hiss at the friction. She sucks in a breath at the contact and her hips stutter towards him, and he grins, because he loves being right nearly as much as he loves her.

“You're unbelievable,” she says mildly. She threads the hand at the back of his neck up into his hair and makes a fist, softly tugging on the strands in a way that makes him moan. “What tipped you off?”

“Educated guess, really,” he says. He lolls his head obediently into her grip, just to see her smile. “I know you.”

“We're definitely coming back to this at a later date,” she says. She snakes the palm pressed to his chest down his ribs and around his waist to slot it behind him, tucked between his spine and the door. She uses it to pull him an inch or two closer, only to leverage her thigh in a smooth thrust aimed right at his center of gravity. The maneuver shoves him back against the door just hard enough to knock the breath from his lungs. He makes a thoroughly undignified sound in response, and she just smiles, all teeth. “Most of the things I'd like to do to you require prior negotiation.”

The explicit confirmation that there will be a next time makes his heart race, and the implication that it could involve more manhandling from her is enough to make him keen. He gives a pleased little hum, circling his hands to rest in the dip of her waist. “Mm. Don't threaten me with a good time.”

She laughs, and it's just as infectious as it always is. He's played enough chess with Camilla for this– the push and pull, the cat and mouse, the joint playfulness of strategy– to come naturally. The miles of skin-on-skin as she surges forward to kiss him, though, fitting her body against his from shoulder to knee with nothing in between them? That, however, is a goddamned epiphany.

Her skin is soft and warm, and the feeling of her bare breasts squished up against his chest could prove addicting. She must be standing on her tiptoes, because his dick’s pressed neatly in the crease where her hip meets her thigh. He slots his own thigh between her legs to give her something to rock her hips against, and he's startled even through her shorts and his sweatpants by the sheer heat of her core as she rolls her hips down and starts to grind with an appreciative little huff.

“You're so warm here,” he says, kicking himself for how stupid it sounds as he pulls back to scatter kisses over her cheek and her jaw. “Between your legs, I mean. Your–” he pauses, considering. “Terminology?” He's only ever heard her use the proper anatomical language in reference to herself, which seems a touch clinical given the circumstances.

“That would be because I'm wet,” she says, clearly amused, even as she shivers faintly on what must have been a particularly pleasant drag of her hips. “And it's my cunt, at least in sexual contexts. If you call it my pussy I'm laughing you out of the room. Clit’s fine. You?”

“Noted,” he says. He supposes that makes sense– she's always been more of a tits girl, citing the word boobs as intolerably juvenile. He's suddenly dizzy all over again at the prospect of getting to touch, to explore, to witness a new side of Cam and, God willing, learn how to make her feel good. He's hit with a wash of nerves at the somewhat-daunting responsibility of making it good for her, but if Camilla is as patient and generous of a teacher with this as she is with everything else, he's sure he'll be fine. He's far from clueless, but theory and practice are two different things. “Um, no preference, really. Nothing too florid?” He tugs at her waist gently, to guide the motion of her hips and give her a little more friction.

“I'll try and refrain from euphemisms like velvet-wrapped steel, then,” she jokes as she squirms against him. Her voice is still steady, but as he helps her drag her cunt more fully across his thigh, her lashes flutter, and her breath starts to come in quiet pants. He's struck with the sudden realization that this is his doing, that she's in this state because of him, and the weight of that responsibility, that privilege, sends a flare of heat flooding through his veins.

“My dick is extremely grateful,” he jokes back.

“Your dick’s hard, is what it is,” she quips. Said dick twitches against her hip, as though it had sensed itself being discussed. She must have felt it, judging by the way she smirks.

“Well, yes,” he says, somewhat bashfully. “I was sort of in the middle of something.”

She hums in acknowledgement, and it comes out sounding thoughtful, but decidedly unapologetic. “Sure. Do you–” she pauses, arching her spine to try and get the pressure right where she wants it. It must work, because her next grind elicits an honest-to-god whine, albeit a quiet one. She licks her lips, blinks a few times to compose herself, and tries again. “The crying. Is it that you're trying to come and getting frustrated that it's not working? Because that's what it sounds like.”

“Sometimes,” he murmurs, ducking his head to suck lightly at her pulse point, pulling away after a moment for fear of leaving a mark. “But mostly I'm just crying because it's so good. I'm easily overwhelmed.”

She stops and stares at him for a moment, before swearing under her breath and surging in to kiss him. He parts his lips and softens his jaw, content to open himself up to her, to give her something malleable and sweet to fuck her tongue into, like she's so clearly itching to do. If he could bottle and distill her ensuing noise of delight and approval, he thinks he'd be drunk off it for the rest of his life.

“Okay,” she murmurs eventually, his face still cradled in her palms. “You're too tall. My calves are getting sore. I'm moving us to the bed. Crying is good?”

“Fine by me. Crying is very good,” he confirms. In the interest of transparency, he adds: “But it'll probably happen regardless, so don't let it go to your head.”

The look on her face suggests that this is the opposite of a problem. “No promises.”

She takes his hand and leads him over to his bed in the corner, where she motions for him to sit with his back up against the wall. As soon as he does, she settles in his lap facing him, knees pressed into the mattress on either side of his hips as she lowers herself down to straddle his thighs, her hands braced on his shoulders. The weight of her in his lap is warm and reassuring. He sets one hand to her waist and smooths the other up and down her thigh.

“I was planning to ride you, when the time comes,” she says, in the same businesslike, perfunctory tone she uses to read off the grocery list, or tell him her schedule.

“My girl, ever the tactician,” he jokes, because it was either that or whimpering, and he's trying to save that for a slightly more dignified moment. “You've got this down to brass tacks, don't you?”

She thwacks him on the shoulder with a glare, which he supposes is only fair. “I'm not complaining,” he says hurriedly. He tucks a loose strand of her hair behind her ear and moves to palm at her ass in a way that he hopes will come across as conciliatory. She arches into the touch and gives a happy little wiggle in his lap, so he deems it a success overall. “Any particular reason why? I'm all for it, I'm just curious.” Asking her to walk him through her line of logical reasoning is self-indulgent and he knows it, but he's always loved getting a glimpse into how her mind works. Besides, she's almost always willing to humor him.

“Seemed like our best bet logistically,” she says. “I have dildos, but they're a little shorter. I happen to like having my cervix hit, so I'm not too worried, but you're pretty long even when you're soft. Figured I should take it slow to be safe.”

“Christ,” he breathes, swallowing the lump in his throat. “Good to know.” He'd known on some rational level, or at least assumed, that Camilla, like most human beings, likely engages in the act of masturbation from time to time. But knowing something in the abstract is a world apart from knowing something, and he's rapidly finding her signature blunt demeanor to be something that really, really works for him, sexually speaking.

“Did I break you?” she teases. “Do you need a minute? This is the part where I remind you that the other half of the population jerks off too, Warden.”

“I know,” he says, “it's not that. I just love how forward you are, is all. It's extremely hot.”

She stifles a laugh at that, but he can tell she's flattered by the look in her eye. “Well that's a relief. If you wanted demure, you'd be out of luck.”

“Trying to conceive of a universe in which you could ever be plausibly described with a word like demure is going to give me a headache,” he says, pulling a face. “Can we circle back to the part where you implied my dick’s big?”

That gets a blush out of her: it's faint, but it's there.

It's a nice reprieve, this exchange of mutual banter. The familiarity is a welcome reminder that it's just them, in this room– just him, just Camilla. Now that they've slowed down a bit, he's able to ground himself in the knowledge that no matter how this plays out in the end, they're going to be okay.

“You're insufferable,” she says. “It's not flattery. I'm just being factual. Your dick is proportionally average, you're just tall. Don't let it go to your head.”

“Too late. The damage is done,” he jokes. “Are these the sort of thoughts you've been having all the times I've caught you staring at my dick in the shower? Camilla, you dog.”

(Outgrowing the habit of occasional coed communal bathing is the sort of endeavor that's best reserved for people who value boundaries, which is to say that he and Cam have simply never seen the point.)

“You noticed?” She frowns, looking appropriately caught-out. It's very cute; he can't help but laugh.

“Of course I noticed,” he says. “I just didn't mind.” He pulls her down into a lazy kiss, and they spend the next several minutes getting lost in the simple joy of swapping spit.

She tugs her hair free of its scrunchie and shakes her head until it hangs loose and dark around her jaw, which is probably the closest he'll get to receiving an engraved invitation to touch. He takes her up on the offer and cards his fingers through it. She hums softly into the kiss, and the feel of it on his tongue emboldens him to try and tug a fistful of hair at the nape of her neck. It's a plan that's perfect in theory, but the execution is somewhat hampered by the fact of her undercut, a detail he'd neglected to consider until his hand comes up empty.

“Just move up,” she murmurs, nipping sharply at his jaw. “Back of my head.”

He tries again, and when he closes a gentle fist around a loose handful of strands, the soft sound she lets out is nothing short of perfection. He chooses to ignore the way it makes his dick ache.

“Marks okay?” she asks, her voice muffled against his neck. It takes him a moment to parse her meaning, but he's nodding as soon as it clicks.

“More than, yeah, please,” he replies, tilting his head to give her room to work. “Speaking of head,” he gasps, as Cam bites a bruise into his throat. “Is that– something you'd like?” The hand he's got fisted in her hair tenses involuntarily, pulling harder at the feeling of her incisors grazing over his carotid. Her hips twitch in a reflexive little half-thrust as she moans.

“Fuck, I was hoping you'd say that,” she sighs.

“Good, because I'd really, really love to go down on you,” he says, in between gasps and little pain-pleasure sounds as she worries his skin between her teeth. “Do you like being eaten out?”

He tries to ask this casually, as though giving head hasn't been the star player in every sexual fantasy he's had since he first learned that getting his face between a pretty girl's legs was even an option. He hopes that years of enthusiastic theory will translate into half-decent practice– he struggles to imagine anything more mortifying than the idea of making Cam suffer through painfully mediocre head.

“Wouldn't know,” she says, pulling away from his neck to resume the decisive downward rhythm of her hips. “I suspect I will though. I like the showerhead. That's supposedly the next best thing.”

The thought of getting to be the first person to give her this is a dizzying one, but he chooses not to dwell on it, for fear of it being perhaps less than feminist of him. He focuses on the latter half of her reply instead.

“I am learning so many things about you,” he says, in tones of genuine delight. “Wait, is that why I haven't heard you through the wall?”

“Some of us are capable of being quiet,” she teases. “But that's part of it, yeah. I usually just do it in the shower. More efficient that way.”

He hums thoughtfully and moves to grip a strong thigh in each hand. “Should hope it feels nice, too,” he says, dropping his voice a little lower. He teases the tips of his thumbs just barely underneath the hems of her sleep shorts where they're riding up on her quads, traces them back and forth until she shivers. “Efficiency's good and all, but I hear the point of the exercise is to enjoy yourself.”

She shifts a little closer, a little to the left. The next roll of her hips drags the searing line of her cunt with ruthless precision along the tent of his dick, rather than his thigh. It's enough to make them both swear.

“The showerhead’s nice,” she says, her voice rumbling low in her chest. “It's hot. It's wet. Easy enough to pretend it's a mouth.” Her eyes are molten as she says it.

He groans and tips his forehead down to rest it on her collarbone. “You're a fucking wonder, you know that?”

She smiles. “I'm aware. You want to get your mouth on me. I want to ride you. Anything you want to add to the agenda?” She grinds down into his lap again, and it's all he can do to dig his fingertips into the lovely give of her thighs and try not to come in his sweatpants.

“That seems like a good place to start,” he says on a broken gasp. “Anything else I should know?”

“Well, since you're asking.” She sits back on her heels, pulling her hands away from his shoulders and bringing them up to cup her breasts instead. “My tits are sensitive,” she starts, tweaking a dark, lovely nipple between two knuckles as she squeezes. “One's fine, but if you make me come again I'll want to keep going until I can't. Penetration’s good, but only if I ask for it. Go deep and slow. Consistency’s good. Friction’s good. Pressure’s great if you can manage it. Side-to-side with the flats of three fingertips works best for my clit. I need to bite down on something when I come.” She tips her head to the side, considering, her hands still working at her tits. As she tilts her head, the dark, silky ends of her hair just barely brush the top of her left shoulder. She's so goddamn lovely it hurts. “I've got a thing about spit?” she offers. “Think that about covers it.”

Palamedes has never, ever been more grateful for his perfect memory. Cam may as well have just given him a topographical map charting any number of ways to get her off, and they both know it. He'd be a fool not to use it. He can feel himself grinning from ear to ear.

“Oh, this is going to be fun,” he says. “Good thing or bad thing? The spit, I mean.” He skims a hand up to knead at her left tit, pinching and rolling her nipple firmly between his thumb and forefinger. It's an action that's promptly rewarded with a full-body shiver and a low, throaty moan. He smirks.

“Good thing,” she breathes, all glassy eyes and restless hips.

He'd teased her earlier for how affected she'd been by all his frantic, pathetic desperation, for how obviously she'd wanted to come to his aid and kiss it better, so to speak. He thinks he gets it, now, torn as he is between the desire to alleviate Cam's distress by giving her what she needs, and the urge to keep winding her up tighter and tighter just to see her snap.

“It's a little disgusting,” she says, her voice faintly apologetic at the edges. “There's a nonzero chance of me asking you to spit in my mouth, fair warning. You're free to say no.”

Ah, he thinks. So that's why she kisses the way that she does.

Dulcie had once called him a “textbook Sagittarius,” whatever that means, on account of his “perennial willingness to try anything once.” She might have been on to something. He can't truthfully say it's a thought he's ever had before, but he's operating on sheer instinct when he opens his mouth and sticks out his tongue with nothing more than a smirk and a go on then, show me quirk of an eyebrow.

He doesn't quite catch what Cam says next. He's too caught up in the, as it turns out, borderline religious experience that is Camilla Hect leaning over him and spitting neatly into his open mouth. It slips his hearing, just barely, but it sure sounded a lot like a whispered motherfucker under her breath. Her eyes hungrily track the clear, glittering shine of her spit as it lands squarely on his tongue. His eyes roll back a little, his dick throbs. It's a whole thing.

“Yeah, alright,” he pants out, once he's swallowed it down. “I think I can work with that.” He thinks he gets it, now– it's possessive, it's degrading, it’s made him feel vaguely dirty in a primal, shameless, indulgent sort of way. He squirms a little underneath her, so unbelievably turned on that it's hard to stay still. “Jesus, Camilla. You're going to wreck me, you know that?”

“Atta boy,” she jokes, equal parts condescending and indulgent as she pats his shoulder. The effect is, altogether, devastating. He shivers. “You're so dramatic. You'll be fine. Is there any housekeeping still left to go over, or can I touch your dick now?”

“By all means,” he says, heart in his throat. “I'm sure I'll think of something, but in the meantime, please, knock yourself out. Just– careful, it's sensitive.”

She nods and starts to slide a hand down his chest. His nerves must show, because she smiles at him a little and leans in to press the faintest kiss to the very corner of his mouth. It does a marvelous job of reining in his racing thoughts.

She runs her palm across his chest, stopping to flick one of his nipples hard enough to make him yelp. She traces her fingertips over the bumps of his ribs, down the faint trail of hair leading to his waistband. Her gaze is studious, almost- a clinical, experimental sort of curiosity that makes him feel like an ant beneath a microscope. It's bizarrely erotic, if he's being honest.

“What's your refractory period like? Ballpark.” She slides her hand between them to palm him through his sweatpants. The fabric is damp at the tip; he must be leaking precome. He gasps at the pressure, and fights to keep his hips from bucking up into her touch.

“Like, fifteen minutes?” he says, gripping her waist and holding on for dear life. “Ten, on a good day. Why?”

“Just curious,” she says, which absolutely means she's up to something. She flicks her eyes up to meet his. “Tell me if you're close?”

He gives her a shaky nod, and she scoots back a bit on his lap to give herself room to work as she slips a hand beneath his waistband.

Her hand is hot, and soft, and he groans as she makes an experimental fist around his dick and gives it a faint squeeze.

“Fuck,” he whispers. “That's–”

“Yeah?” she asks, giving him a gentle half-stroke. “How's that feel?”

“It's good,” he says, letting his head fall back against the wall and closing his eyes. “Fuck, Cam.”

Her grip is perfect, firm but not too tight, and the dry friction of her palm as she starts to slowly jerk him off is overwhelming enough to make him whine.

“You are sensitive,” she says, as he shivers on a dizzying stroke of her hand from root to tip. “Cute.”

He feels himself blushing, and he turns his face towards the wall in an effort to hide. She laughs softly, and the sound of it makes heat flare in the pit of his stomach.

She reaches the end and twists her wrist a little as she strokes over the head, and he's absurdly grateful for her weight on his lap holding him down as his hips try to jackknife up off the bed.

“Too much?” she asks. He shakes his head with enough emphasis to make his glasses rattle.

“No, it's good,” he gasps. “You're good. It's just a lot.”

“You poor thing,” she teases, sounding deadpan and dry and wholly unsympathetic, though not cruelly so. He has to bite back a whimper as he feels a bead of pre leak from his slit.

“Jesus,” he hisses. “How are you so good at this.”

“Research,” she says vaguely. She shifts on his lap, straddling one of his thighs and starting to grind on it again.

He squints up at her. “I assume by research you mean porn?”

She shrugs. “Clearly it was educational.” She abandons her grip on his cock in favor of petting her fingertips over the head, which is frankly just mean, on account of how much it makes him tremble. “You’re leaking pre. It's kind of hot.”

“...Thank you?” he chokes out, his voice cracking on a moan as she drags her thumbnail over his slit.

She hums softly. “I'm gonna take you out now. Wanna see.”

“Go for it,” he murmurs, sounding dazed. He settles his hands at her hips as she rocks them idly against his thigh.

She pulls him free from his sweatpants, her gaze cool as she looks him over. Her hips stutter, though, against his thigh, once, twice. Her tongue darts out to wet her lips on a sharp inhale. He bites back a smile.

She's quiet for a moment as she takes him in hand again, long enough that he's tempted to say something stupid like penny for your thoughts? or, worse yet, like what you see?, but eventually she breaks the silence.

“Pretty,” she says finally, all warm and low and decisive, and that's just–

“You can't just say shit,” he whines, throwing his head back on a loud keen.

She just laughs, and pulls her hand away to spit into it neatly before wrapping it back around his dick. It's a tableau that comes dangerously close to spiking his blood pressure high enough to put him in an early grave. Perished as a consequence of getting to witness Camilla Hect’s glorious spit crimes is an awful lot to fit in the cause of death box on an autopsy report, though, so he tries to keep it together, out of courtesy to the poor coroner.

The added slip of her palm against him mellows the overwhelming friction into something altogether more tolerable, the kind of thing that can build and build until he's close. It's not long before he's fighting for breath and squirming beneath her, trying to twist away and arch closer in equal measure, his nerve endings so shot that his body can seemingly no longer decide what it wants. He recognizes the familiar feeling for what it is.

“You're gonna make me come if you're not careful,” he warns, panting and writhing his way through a set of strokes so tight and perfect he can't help but shiver. “I'm close.”

His throat’s starting to feel tight, the space behind his eyes gone all hot and achey. He swallows around the lump in his throat and sniffs a little as she finds the sensitive spot just underneath the head and starts to work it mercilessly with her fingertips.

“Good,” she murmurs, leaning in to kiss his forehead. “You’re okay? It's not too much?”

“Yes,” he whimpers. “No. I don't know. I'm okay, don't stop, please don't stop. It's just a lot, Cam. It's so, so good, but it's a lot, fuck.”

“I know,” she says, sweet and even, pushing his slipping glasses back up on his nose. “But you can take it. You're doing so well.”

Her words made him cry out, make his vision start to blur, make his brain feel all fuzzy and overheated. He notices her expression of pride and fascination and naked hunger a heartbeat before he registers the sensation of his own tears spilling over.

“There you go,” she whispers, continuing to work him over.

“Sorry, fuck,” he says, swiping at his eyes reflexively behind his glasses with the heel of his hand as he blinks back tears. He's so fucking close he can feel it in his teeth. “Sorry.”

“Don't apologize,” she says, her tone surprisingly firm. “Common physiological reaction to pleasure. If it helps, I've developed a Pavlovian response to it by now.”

All he can do is nod, too caught up in fighting the urge to close his eyes as the tension behind his hips spools tighter. He looks up at her instead, the shine of awestruck desire in her eyes, how she bites her lip as her gaze keeps flicking back and forth between his face and his cock like she can't decide where to look. The strong spread of her thighs around his own, all her shameless, steady confidence and curiosity. He's so close, and it occurs to him that he should probably be touching her instead of fisting his hands at his sides in the bedsheets like a limp fish, but he can't think, he can't breathe under the onslaught of pleasure, her clever hands and her piercing gaze, and-

He watches Cam’s free hand snake its way between her legs, pressed tight between his thigh and her cunt as she rubs herself over her boxers. Her lashes flutter, and the sight of it steals what little breath he has left from his lungs. “You're almost there, aren't you?” she says, a touch breathy. “You're gonna come for me. I can tell. Stop fighting it. Just let it happen. I've got you.”

“Fuck, Cam, Camilla, I'm–”

That's it, it's over, he's gone. His balls draw up tight, and his cock gives one last valiant twitch, and then he's coming into her hand with a startled cry of pleasure and relief, spend dripping down the backs of her knuckles as she works him through it with slow, gentle strokes, dragging it out for so long that he has to close his eyes against the raw-nerve intensity of it all. She keeps touching him until he starts to soften, until he hisses in oversensitivity and bats her hand away.

“That,” he wheezes as he sags back against the wall, “was not a handjob.” He pauses, fighting to catch his breath as he puts his dick away, feeling strangely shy in the aftermath. “That was a federal interrogation. That was an attempt on my life. Fucking hell. Thank you.”

“And yet here you are, alive to bitch about it,” she says smugly. “You're welcome.”

He throws an arm over his eyes and laughs, still out of breath and grinning so wide his face hurts. “Give me a second to catch my breath, and I'll return the favor,” he says.

She hums in agreement, as if to say Take your time. There's an oddly wet sound coming from somewhere above him. When he opens his eyes to investigate the source, he's startled to find Cam licking her hand clean of his come with methodical and precise swipes of her tongue. It's ridiculously hot, but also–

He blinks at her, agog. “Cam, what the fuck?”

She pauses, staring blankly down at him. “Is there a problem?”

“I–” he starts, gesturing vaguely with a free hand. “I don't know, just. Safe sex? STIs? You're supposed to talk about these things first, before you go ingesting people’s fluids.”

“First of all, ew,” she says, as if she's not the one doing it. “Second of all, please. You'd have told me if there was anything to worry about.”

“You place an alarming amount of trust in me sometimes, you know that?” he says, tucking himself back into his sweatpants.

She raises an eyebrow. “Am I wrong?”

“...No,” he admits, a touch sullen. She's not wrong, but that's beside the point. He could have been having a hot girl summer, as Dulcie would say, without Cam’s knowledge. Just absolutely whoring himself all over campus. Slutting it up left and right. Theoretically. He resents her implication to the contrary, even if it is, for the most part, accurate.

“I rest my case,” she says. “Besides, you're about to go down on me.” He shivers at the reminder. “I don't exactly see a dental dam lying around. Stones and glass houses, Warden.” And with that, she finishes licking her hand clean. His dick makes an anemic attempt at stirring back to life.

He opens his mouth on a protest of That's different! before falling silent upon realizing that it absolutely, categorically, is not.

“Fair point,” he cedes instead. “That reminds me, though. I need to go grab a condom, so we have it for later.”

“Do you?” she asks. “Our collective virginity and my IUD beg to differ.”

In the interest of preserving what little sanity he has left, his brain skips clean over her first sentence and all its implications, in favor of focusing on the minutiae of the second one.

He'd somehow forgotten about her IUD, even though he'd gone with her to insist on proper pain management and to hold her hand through the procedure.

“Hey, I've done...things,” he protests, albeit weakly.

Things is perhaps an overly generous characterization of the drunken, clumsy, and thoroughly unreciprocated blowjob he'd given Naberius Tern the once at a Tridentarius house party. But he'd had the presence of mind to use a condom, and he's since passed all his physicals with flying colors, so he figures Cam doesn't need to know the details. Not his finest hour, really– he'd been gin drunk, okay, and mistakes were made. Besides, he'd hate to kill the mood: there's the sort of pathetic that Camilla evidently finds attractive, and then there's the sort that's just vaguely sad.

“Sure,” she says, in the tone of voice that means she's opting to humor him. “Anything that could have feasibly given you an STI?”

“No,” he concedes, shaking his head. “You?”

“That's what I thought. And no, not unless they've invented new infections you can acquire via over-the-clothes heavy petting in basements.”

He blinks. Oddly specific; he'll have to get the backstory there someday. “Well, that's half the battle,” he muses. “I assume you want me to pull out, then?” He's not stupid enough to think it adequate on its own, but coupled with Cam's IUD, it seems like a safe enough bet.

“You can if you want. Copper IUD’s over ninety-nine percent effective, though,” she says, shrugging a little as though she hasn't just asked him to fuck her raw. “I was kind of looking forward to that part.”

“Jesus, Camilla,” he breathes. “You don't do anything by halves, do you. You're sure about this?”

“Does it feel like I'm having second thoughts?” She takes his hand and guides it between her legs, pressing it to her still-clothed cunt. She must be absolutely soaked, he thinks, because she's fever-hot and damp against his palm even through her shorts. He remembers her earlier advice and presses three fingertips up against the seam of her boxers, moving them in an experimental side-to-side motion.

“Not quite,” she says. “Move up a little.”

He does as he's told, and if her little hiss of pleasure wasn't enough, the feeling of her hand clamping down hard on his shoulder makes it clear when he's found the right spot.

“There?” he asks, looking up at her, wide-eyed with awe. Her lower lip is caught between her teeth, her pupils blown full-black. He presses in a little firmer, and– he's admittedly flying blind here, but he's pretty sure he can fucking feel it through the damp cotton, swollen and begging for attention. “Christ, Cam, I can feel your fucking heartbeat.”

“Congratulations, you managed to find the clit,” she snarks. “Do you want a prize?” He politely ignores the fact that her jaw drops open on a shaky gasp halfway through.

“Pretty sure the prize is getting to touch your clit,” he says, continuing to do exactly that.

She swats him on the shoulder. “Focus,” she chides. “Stop trying to distract me. I can go get a condom if you want,” she offers. “But I'm fine either way. If it makes you feel better, Coronabeth keeps a stock of emergency mifepristone on hand. Worst case scenario, she owes me a favor.”

This must be what people mean, he thinks, when they extoll the virtues of good communication in bed. This, or something like it.

“How long does it last again?” he asks. “Your IUD, I mean.” Forgoing a condom contradicts every lecture on responsibility he's ever been given, but she makes an admittedly compelling case. And at the end of the day, his strongest instinct and fatal flaw will inevitably always be to give Camilla Hect anything and everything she wants.

“Twelve years,” she says, sounding equal parts patient and amused. “I've only had it for two. Checked my strings this morning.”

The thought that the next decade of his life could potentially involve his best friend asking him to come inside her on a semi-frequent basis is making his head feel wonderfully dizzy.

“Fuck it,” he says finally. “Alright. Do you still want me to-”

“Yes, please,” she says, scrambling off of his lap and wriggling shamelessly out of her boxer shorts and underwear.

It takes them a moment to reposition, but soon Cam’s lying back at the head of his bed wearing nothing but her socks and the hair tie on her wrist. It's nothing he hasn't seen before in the shower, or all the times she's changed in front of him. But seeing is one thing, and being invited to truly look is another.

She's propped up on her elbows, her feet planted flat on the bed with her knees pressed together. As he settles on the bed alongside her, the look of mischief on her face tells him it's a maneuver designed to tease, rather than preserve her modesty. There's a hint of nerves in her body language, sure, but it matches his own: the inherent anticipation of something new. The notable lack of any self-conscious shyness on her part makes him smile. He's glad she feels comfortable.

“You're extraordinary, Cam,” he says, running a palm up each of her legs. He marvels at the lovely dusting of soft, dark hair that graces her shins, thrills at the goosebumps he finds raised along the outer edges of her thighs. “I hope you know that.” She's so beautiful– her hair splayed across his pillow, the faint flush in her cheeks, the want in her eyes. The proud line of her nose is, as always, terribly handsome. He eyes the rise and fall of her ribs as she breathes, the faded stretch marks that span her hips, the carved-marble muscle of her thighs, and feels his mouth start to water.

He palms her iliac crests, admiring the sleek, aquatic layers of muscle and fat protecting the organs and bones beneath. She's so– alive, her body an extraordinary machine hard at work, each and every cell designed for efficiency and built to last. Like this, splayed out on his XL-twin dorm bed, happy and eager and keen, she's all but glowing with vitality. It's such a welcome contrast to his own knobby, bird boned, creaky-hinge frame.

They're just legs, Warden,” she teases. “You should see what's between them.”

“I’d quite like to,” he says. “Show me?”

Camilla Hect lets her legs fall open to either side of her, and Palamedes Sextus meets his ruin.

“Fuck,” he breathes, dumbstruck, awed. “Fuck. Camilla, you're-”

She's a damned miracle, is what she is. Not to mention soaked. The pinkish-brown folds of her cunt shine in the low light, slick and ripe and fundamentally pretty in a way that makes him suddenly understand the perennial likenings to fruit. He can see her clit peeking out from beneath the soft thatch of hair, flush with arousal. She's so turned on he can taste salt on the air, alongside her familiar soap-and-leather smell. It's fucking with his head a little.

“You may have created a monster,” he says, as he moves to lie between her legs. “I fear I'll want to get my face down here as often as you'll let me. You'll have to drag me off by my hair.” He loops his arms underneath her thighs, pressing a soft kiss to the inside of the right one as he noses at the crease of her pelvis. Her heels come to rest on his shoulder blades.

She gives an amused little hum from up above him. “Nah,” she says. “Wouldn't work. You'd like that too much.” One of her hands comes up to knead at her breast, while the other slips down to trace slow, lazy patterns through the glittering mess between her thighs, mere inches away from his face. Her fingertips play a circle around her clit, and he can hear her breath hitch as her hips chase the motion.

He has to close his eyes for a moment and rest his forehead on her inner thigh as he swears under his breath. He'd neglected to consider the consequences of lying on his stomach for this part– namely, the fact that he's now face-to-face with his best friend's devastatingly gorgeous cunt, and the fact that his hips are pressed square to the mattress. It doesn't exactly help matters that this is one of his preferred positions for getting himself off, flat on his stomach with a hand shoved down his pants. Lying prone is a favorite on nights where he's feeling particularly wiggly, when he just wants to gasp and whine into his pillow and rut against something until he comes. He can already tell he'll be helplessly humping the bed before this is over. He hopes Cam will be into that.

“I think I'm going to like everything about this a little too much,” he murmurs. “God, you smell good. Can you get my glasses?”

She laughs as she plucks them from his face and sets them on the nightstand for safekeeping. “I had a feeling you'd like th–”

Her laugh cracks on a shocky moan halfway through as he drops his jaw, sticks out his tongue, and abruptly licks a broad, hot stripe up the line of her cunt.

“Fuck,” she says, startled. It's the lowest he's ever heard her voice: guttural, smoky, pure gravel. “Oh, fuck. Do that again.”

He does it again, relishing in the bright taste of her on his tongue– she tastes like saltwater and copper, like musk and honey. It's heady, and more than a little intoxicating, and he decides that he loves it unutterably.

He feels her thighs tensing under his hands, her cunt twitching against his tongue as she sinks a hand in his hair and braces the other against the wall with a loud, open-palmed slap.

“Okay,” she gasps, blinking up at the ceiling. He watches her throat work as she composes herself. “Good thing you're happy down there,” she says after a moment. “Because I'm going to want this from you as often as you're willing to give it. Fuck, Palamedes.”

He grins against her, looking up the length of her body to meet her hot-eyed gaze. He’s always loved the shape of his full name in her mouth. Her abs are fucking insane from this angle, he notes, as he licks over her again just to watch her lips part on a sharp gasp that subsequently melts into a liquid sigh of pleasure.

He uses his grip on her thighs to spread them a touch wider, shouldering his way between them without a single worry for her range of motion. She's always been the flexible one, ever since he can remember, but a lifetime spent funneling all the excess energy of her childhood hyperactivity into gymnastics and sports has left her, as Gideon once put it, ‘like, concerningly bendy.’ (He keeps nagging her to look into connective tissue disorders, but that's a thought for another time.)

He raises an eyebrow at her as if to say Yeah? That good, huh? She's a touch out-of-focus without his glasses, but he'd recognize Cam's Yeah, yeah. Don't push it. glare anywhere.

He licks a set of arcing parentheses to either side of her, mouthing along the twin strips of skin that form the border between her cunt and her thighs. She tilts her hips up toward his mouth, her hand gripping tight and perfect around a fistful of his hair as she bullies him back where she wants him. The sting in his scalp and the strength of her forearm are enough to have him moaning open-mouthed against her cunt, enough to make his dick stir down where it's pressed into the bed beneath his bodyweight.

He goes where he's led, experimentally pointing his tongue a little in an effort to work his way deeper as he starts licking into her in earnest, parting her labia to lap eagerly at her opening. She's hottest here, where the taste of her is at its strongest, where she's dripping. She's whining above him, honest-to-God whining, repetitive, pitchy little keens of breath that send heat flaring down his spine. The knowledge that he's the one pulling those sorts of sounds from her mouth is doing unspeakable things to his ego. As he traces his tongue in circles around her opening, the tip of his nose bumps up against her clit, and he's promptly rewarded by her soft, throaty cry and a fresh wave of slick on his tongue.

He takes it as a sign, deciding she's sufficiently warmed up for now as he shifts his attention upwards. He licks a path from her cunt up towards her clit, before mouthing at it gently. More than anything else he's almost kissing it, really, all open mouth and dragging lips and eager tongue. He’s operating on a hunch as he works her over with the same sort of artless, sloppy enthusiasm she brings to kissing. Judging by the choked sound she makes, how she arches her spine and palms the back of his skull to shove his face harder against her, it's a roaring success.

“Fuck,” she whispers, sounding almost wounded. He'd be a little worried, were it not for the hand still on his head making it very clear that she's got him exactly where she wants him. “Your mouth.”

He taps her on the thigh, and she loosens her grip on his head just enough to let him pull back and breathe. “Yeah?” he asks, swiping messily at his mouth with the back of a hand. “Any notes?”

“More on my clit, but it’s all really good,” she says, rolling her needy hips up against empty air. “I can definitely come from this.”

“Wonderful news,” he says, diving back in with renewed vigor. He pulls his arms free from where they’d been looped around her legs, instead opting to pin each thigh to the bed with a forearm, leaving his hands free to pet along her pubic bone, to spread her open and coax her clit out from its hood.

He descends on her like a man starved, licking her open with relentless fervor as she shakes and gasps above him. He explores, tests out different strokes of his tongue and varying degrees of pressure, catalogues which spots make her moan and which techniques make her hips buck up against his face as he buries it between her legs. He's wet clear down his jaw, between the spit drooling from his mouth and the slick drooling from her cunt. The physicality of it is all-encompassing, in a way that tells him he could easily get lost down here for hours and die a happy man.

She'd mentioned liking a back-and-forth motion on her clit with fingers, but she seems to favor up-and-down strokes when it comes to his tongue. He's happy to oblige, even as a pleasant sort of soreness starts to ache in his jaw. “That's good,” she says breathlessly, the rolling of her hips growing increasingly tense and rhythmic in a way that strikes him as potentially promising. “Feels good, good boy, don't stop.”

It slips out of her mouth like a thoughtless admission, a stream of consciousness thought casually bundled in with the rest of her praise, but it hits him like a meteor.

He's not quick enough to stifle the loud and automatic whine it rips from his chest, so he muffles it against her clit instead. Cam, clever Cam, brilliant Cam, puts two and two together in a heartbeat.

“Oh,” she sighs, practically trembling beneath him. “You liked that.”

He nods so emphatically that it makes him a little dizzy, making a point not to stop the motion of his tongue. He's half-hard, again, rapidly approaching full-mast, and he grants himself the indulgence of a few shivering and clumsy thrusts against the mattress, mostly for Camilla's benefit. There's something to be said for visual aids, after all: Yes, I liked it, I liked it so much, please say it again.

“This is getting you hard again, isn't it?” She looks down at him searchingly, her eyes hungrily tracking the motion of his hips even as her jaw hangs open in pleasure. She cards her hand through his hair as he whines a confirmation, combing it sweetly back off of his face before gripping it harshly again in her fist, hard enough to make him mewl. “Good fucking boy,” she murmurs, low and rough and halfway to a growl, and Christ, Christ alive, she's gonna be the death of him.

“Oh my God?” he gasps, his words half-muffled by her cunt. “Cam, holy shit.”

“Too much?” she asks quickly, and he shakes his head, savoring the way the motion pulls at his scalp.

“Fuck no, you're good,” he wheezes, and she nods in assent, evidently satisfied.

“Okay,” she says, her back arching clean off the bed as she half-moans at a particularly targeted flick of his tongue. “You want to be a good boy?”

Please, he thinks wildly, looking up at her so she can see it in his eyes. There's suddenly nothing in this world he wants more.

“Then make me come.” Her tone brooks no argument. It's firm, and decisive, and rather fucking bossy, frankly, and he couldn't be more into it if he tried. She wants him to get her off.

So he does.

He's read enough bodice rippers and done enough research to know better than to switch things up at this point, but he redoubles his efforts to lap eagerly at her clit. It's round and soft on his tongue, and he kind of really wants to try sucking on it, but that will have to wait. He just puts his head down, huffs a frantic breath through his nose, ruts down weakly against the bed, and tries his best to not get knocked off-course by the bucking of her hips.

It doesn't take her very long at all, from there. She goes noticeably quiet, as if she's trying to focus on reaching her climax, which is a thought he finds to be strangely kind of cute. He flicks his eyes up, eager to discover what sort of face she makes when she comes. He's awed by the intensity of it, her features scrunched up as if in a silent scream. It almost looks like it hurts. It looks, to put it bluntly, like it feels really, really fucking good.

She stiffens, then, every muscle in her body drawn whip-tight and frozen on the trembling precipice, and he’s reminded of her earlier words as she brings the hand braced against the wall up to her mouth. He watches as she sinks her teeth into the meat of her own palm.

And then she's coming with a muffled and guttural cry, the loudest she's gotten for him yet, and he can feel it, her clit twitching and throbbing in his mouth as she spills across his tongue and shakes apart above him. He coaxes her through it, gradually slowing the speed and gentling the pressure on her clit until she hisses in oversensitivity and nudges him away from it. He switches to lapping softly at her cunt instead while she pets through his hair, drinking down a mouthful or two of her come (her come!!!) and soothing her fluttering opening with his tongue as it clenches through a series of aftershocks.

The thought of being inside her the next time that happens is almost too much for him to handle, and his dick throbs where it's tucked between him and the mattress.

He cleans her up with slow, achingly soft strokes of his tongue until she drags him out from between her legs and up her body with both hands. He scrambles up to lie beside her, grinning at her helplessly even though her eyes are still closed. He slings a leg across her body and an arm across her waist to hold her, wiping his face haphazardly on the back of his hand before tucking it against her collarbone. She turns her face into his hair and makes a dazed, happy little sound, and he presses a tiny, chaste kiss to the slope of her breast for her trouble.

“Messy,” she says, upon reaching out blindly in search of his face and finding the spit-slick line of his jaw with her palm. Her voice sounds a bit rough, but terribly fond. “Thank you. It was good. You were good.”

“Thank you,” he says, feeling flush with pride. He wiggles closer and busies himself with mouthing absentmindedly at her neck. “It's pretty great down there. I think I experienced ego death, at one point.”

She snorts, finally blinking her eyes open to look down at him. “Anytime,” she says. “You're good at that. I knew you would be, but more data never hurts.” She pauses for a moment. “I'll sometimes go nonverbal, after. Forgot to warn you. Didn't happen this time, but just so you know. Wouldn't want you to worry.”

He hums against her skin. “Noted,” he says. “Quiet’s rarely a bad thing, with you. Reckon I'd have figured it out, after a moment.” He reaches out for the hand she'd sunk her teeth into, tangling their fingers together and bringing it up to examine it. She hadn't broken skin, but there's still a perfect imprint of her bite lingering on the heel of her hand down by the meat of her thumb. “Do you always bite here? I'm surprised it doesn't bruise. At least not that I've noticed.”

She shrugs. “Usually. That or a pillow, if there's one around. Couch cushion, once. Forearms work too. Or my shoulder, if I don't have a hand free. I don't bruise easily. Not all of us are anemic, Warden.”

He swats at her in protest, running a fingertip over the indentation left by her canines. “I bruise exceptionally pretty, I'll have you know,” he says, preening. “In case you feel like biting me next time instead.”

“You sure?” she asks. She stretches her arms and legs out, circles her wrists and ankles until they pop. “Sometimes my jaw locks like a pitbull. Reflex, I think.”

“I'm not sure why I find that hot,” he says. “I absolutely do, though, for what it's worth.”

“You've always liked teeth,” Cam muses, turning onto her side in order to face him, dislodging his hold on her in the process. “I remember you waxing poetic about Dulcie's more times than I can count.”

“Okay, but have you seen her teeth?” he asks, flailing a hand in the air. “In my defense.”

“They're good teeth,” she agrees. A shadow crosses her face, her brows knitting together a little as she frowns. “Speaking of,” she says, a twinge of anxiety creeping into the edges of her tone. “Dulcinea?”

“Has made herself and her wishes on the subject more than clear,” he reminds her gently, sighing a little.

“I know,” Cam says, delicately manhandling him over onto his back without so much as a warning. He shivers. Yum. “I'd just hate for her to feel–”

“What, jealous?” he snorts, setting his hands on her hips as she moves to kneel over his lap. “Please. Even if she were interested, which she's clearly not, envying the space you occupy in my life is a fool's errand. She’s smarter than that, give her some credit.”

“True,” Cam says. She's quiet for a moment, idly running her hands over his chest and belly.

“You're not second place to anyone, Cam,” he says softly, after a beat. “It's important to me that you know that. That's not what this is. You're my best friend, not some consolation prize. I'll always love her. It's a sunk cost fallacy, at this point. But I've loved you for longer than I've known the meaning of the word.”

“Sure, Warden,” she says. She rolls her eyes, but the smile hiding in the very corner of her mouth tells him she appreciates the sentiment nonetheless. She shifts closer, moving to straddle his waist instead of his thighs. Her hands come up to cup his face from both sides. “Feeling’s mutual. But just so we're clear,” she says, meeting his eyes head-on, with laser focus and the scrunched-up expression of someone that has a bad taste in their mouth. “I'm nobody's– girlfriend.”

“Oh, God no,” he says fervently, wrinkling his nose. “Perish the thought. I couldn't do that to you, it'd be undignified. It'd be like making a panther live in a studio apartment. I'm not asking for monogamy, either.”

She snorts, patting him on the cheek. “Good. I wasn't planning on offering,” she jokes. “I don't want to get in the way of anything else you're interested in. Just– be safe, and keep me in the loop?”

“Please, you should know by now that putting you in danger of so much as a papercut gives me awful hypertension,” he says. “I tell you everything already, and I have no intentions to change that. Besides, you know informed consent gets me hot under the collar.”

“Your nurse thing’s making more and more sense by the minute,” she teases, and he tries not to blush. “Deal. I'll do the same, of course.” Her hands roam aimlessly across his chest, and she pinches at a nipple until he squeaks. She's getting a bit fidgety again, in a way he's coming to recognize as an indicator that she's horny. His dick perks up a little at the thought.

“Excellent,” he says, clearing his throat and trying not to wiggle beneath her. “So this makes us, what. Friends with benefits?”

She wrinkles her nose. “Makes it sound like a rom-com. Why does sex always have to be some add-on benefit that complicates things? Why can’t the sex just be a part of the friendship? It's fun. It's a way to feel close to someone. Doesn't have to be a whole thing, though. I've never understood that.”

He tilts his head, considering. “You have a point. Friends it is. If I feel the need to call you something, I'll just call you my girl.”

“As if you haven't been calling me your girl since kindergarten,” she says, grinning, which is all the confirmation he needs. She starts to rock her hips down against his stomach, which is a little hysterical, given that there's not exactly any abs to speak of for her to grind on. But she seems like she's having fun nonetheless, so he leaves her to it. “Are you hard again?”

“Oh, eminently so,” he says. “Fantasizing about cunnilingus until I'm humping the mattress is an honored pastime of mine. I've trained for this day, Camilla, believe me.”

She laughs, throwing her head back, and he marvels at the fine column of her throat. “Is that what you usually do? I might need to see that sometime. Sounds hot.”

“Most times, yeah,” he says. “And sure, just say the word. You?”

“I like to kneel with my legs spread.”

“So, how you're sitting now.” He glances down at where she's straddling him, and– god damn, that's a mental image alright. He blinks.

“Mhm,” she hums, clearly humored. “Part of why I wanted to ride you. Positions that activate large muscle groups lend themselves to stronger orgasms. Kneeling’s good for that.” Even without his glasses, it turns out to be one hell of a physical image, too– Camilla sits back on her heels, stuffs a hand between her legs, and abruptly begins putting on a show of opening herself up on her fingers.

“I'd let you do it, but you'd get sidetracked,” she says on a gasp. “We'd be here all night. Next time, though. I'll even sit on your face while you're at it. I'm a generous lover,” she jokes.

“Aw, promise? I'm holding you to that,” he laughs, his eyes trained on the flex of her forearm and the motion of her wrist as she fits a second finger inside herself. She's told him before that he has nice hands, which is the sort of compliment that reads rather differently now in hindsight, with the benefit of newfound context. The thought of fingering her is an admittedly compelling one.

“There's a spot–” she bites out, her eyes falling shut as she curls her wrist and sucks in a breath.

“About an inch in, anterior wall, bumpy texture?” he hazards, petting his hands up and down her thighs. “I only have a prostate to compare it to, but I've heard great things.”

She swears, her hand fumbling clumsily for a second as her body buckles. “Yeah. You've fingered yourself? Fuck, that's hot. Hypothetical– if I get a harness, what are the odds on me strapping you sometime?”

“Decidedly favorable,” he chirps, suppressing a shiver. For some reason, her use of strap for him as opposed to peg is lighting up the gender corner of his brain in a happy-colored neon. “We can go shopping this weekend if you want.”

She nods, a momentary flicker of discomfort passing over her face as she does something tricky with her knuckles. “That's three fingers,” she announces matter-of-factly, pumping them in and out of her cunt a half-dozen or so more times before pulling them free and stuffing them, rather unceremoniously, in his open mouth instead.

He muffles a startled moan around her hand, starting to suck it clean as he licks in between her knuckles. He decides that he quite likes having her in his mouth, the press of her fingers heavy and satisfying on his tongue. He savors the taste of her arousal layered over the baseline flavor of clean skin.

She leans off the bed, wordlessly helping herself to rifling through his nightstand drawer with her free hand until she finds his lube. She tosses him his glasses before he can even ask her to grab them.

“Glasses on, pants off,” she says, no-nonsense as she slips her hand out of his mouth. It takes a surprising amount of effort to keep himself from chasing after it. She swats him on the thigh as she rises up on her knees, giving him room to restore his eyesight, clumsily wriggle out of his sweats, and kick his ankles free. And then it's just them again, in the quiet of his bedroom. Somehow, despite everything else that's happened so far, the simple fact of her bare thighs pressed to his feels like the most intimate thing they've done all night.

“How's your stamina?” she asks, neutral and cool. She drizzles a line of lube from the bottle directly onto his cock, and he hisses at the cold. It's almost certainly overkill. Even if she had blindfolded him, he would've known she was fingering herself by the sound alone, to put it delicately. But he's glad to see her reach for it– he'd have insisted on it anyway, but it's always nice to see her prioritizing her own comfort in any given context.

“I'm honestly not sure?” he says. “I've played around with edging enough to have gotten good at recognizing when I'm close. But I've also never been inside someone before, so I'm harboring no delusions. Guess we'll see?”

“Fair,” she says. “Let me know if you need a minute. I'll pause.”

“You are a saint among men,” he says, leaning in to kiss her shoulder in thanks.

“I know,” she says. And with that, she's grabbing his cock and lining it up, her brows furrowed in concentration as she lowers her hips to meet it. It takes them a try or two, but they finally get the angle right. His cognitive function dies on impact as he slips just barely inside.

“Oh,” she sighs. It's the sound she always makes when she first steps into a hot bath. It sends somewhat of a mixed message, though, when paired with the face she always gets upon encountering a new flavor for the first time, a look of intense evaluation as she determines whether she likes it or not. Her muscles still feel relaxed beneath his hands, though, which is always a good sign, with Cam. “Okay,” she says eventually, having evidently made up her mind, judging by the way her face softens back to neutral.

“Good?” he asks, with the one neuron he's able to spare. The rest are otherwise occupied doing vector calculus in the back of his mind in an effort not to come, or worse, move before she's ready. Christ, but she's tight. If he grips the flesh of her thighs any harder, he's worried she’ll bruise, healthy iron levels be damned. His spatial awareness narrows to the head of his cock and all her fever-wet silk wrapped around it. “Jesus, Cam.”

“It's good,” she says simply, pressing her palms flat to his chest as she sinks down a little deeper, pinning him to the bed with a shaky gasp and one of her tiny, hot-metal smiles. “Just new. You?”

“Never better. You feel fucking incredible,” he says, a little strangled. He can feel a helpless grin spreading across his face. “You should see yourself, love. Hell of a view.”

He means it, too. He likes being under her, likes looking up at her, likes the feeling of her looking down at him. It's not something he gets to enjoy very often, given their height difference. He wants to savor it.

She rolls her eyes, but on her next thrust she braces a hand on his bed behind her and leans back into it. The shift in position highlights her taut quadriceps and obliques, the lines of her body drawn out leonine and proud. It's blatant showboating, and they both know it, but the way she isolates her hips and pelvis in fluid body rolls as she works her way down is nothing short of mesmerizing. He'd be a little surprised at how quickly she's taking to this, but Cam has always been a duck to water. She's all poise and control, until she suddenly bares her throat on a gasp, throwing her head back as her jaw drops and her lashes flutter.

He has half a mind to ask if she's alright, but then he feels her walls clenching down around him. He recalls her shift in position and puts two and two together. He smirks, gripping the back of a thigh in each of his broad hands. “Nice angle?”

“Shut up,” she huffs. She grabs one of his wrists with her free hand and pulls him up to a seated position with her straddling his lap, so fast that it gives him vertigo. “Get up here and touch my tits.”

He shuts up and does as he's told. They're soft and unexpectedly heavy in his hands, and they bounce ever-so-slightly against his palms with every serpentine thrust of her hips. He's read enough erotica to find the phrase perfect handful unbearably cliche and trite, but it's admittedly not far off: Cam’s breasts fill up his hands completely, with enough spillover to make his mouth water. He swipes his thumbs across her hardened nipples and she moans, taking another inch of him inside her with a decisive roll of her hips. Every cell and instinct and nerve ending in his body is damn near screaming at him to grip her by the hips, pull her down, and sink home. He's not going to do it, obviously, but it's taking an unexpected amount of focus to resist the impulse. It's making him feel like a fucking Neanderthal, a little bit, so he ducks his head down to mouth at her tits instead.

“Good boy,” Cam murmurs, immediate and fervent. He muffles a whine against her skin. She's still got one hand braced on the bed behind her for balance and leverage, but she brings the other one up to cradle the back of his skull.

He sucks at the slope of her breast and flicks his eyes up to meet hers, raising an eyebrow to ask if marks are okay. At her eager nod, he gives the flesh a few experimental nips before settling in to worry a patch of skin between his teeth.

“Motherfucker,” she swears, halfway to a snarl as the rhythm of her hips stutters. “That's good, like that. Don't be afraid to get rough with them.”

Because Cam has the pain tolerance of a trained government operative, he takes her word for it, trusting her to tell him if it's too much. He gives one of her nipples a firm pinch, rolling it between his fingertip and thumb as he takes the other one in his mouth.

She lets out a moan above him and buries her hand in his hair, arching her spine into the touch and pressing her tits into his hands. He sucks at her left nipple and toys with the right, focusing all his attention on the task at hand in an effort to drown out the overwhelming heat and friction of her cunt where it's wrapped vice-tight and fluttering around him. He's managed to bite a small bruise against her olive-brown skin, and the sight of it sitting pretty above her areola is making him feel disgustingly possessive and fond.

“God, shit,” she breathes above him, snapping her hips down once, twice, having taken nearly all of him inside herself. “You've got a good dick. Feels nice.”

She's doing all the work, clever, athletic girl that she is, and she's sporting a healthy flush across her face and down her chest. They've been at it for long enough that she's finally getting a little breathless with the exertion. He's always thought that she looks especially exquisite after a workout, or when she's just come home from a run. He's looking forward to watching her put herself through her paces, until she's warm-through with blood and lactic acid and proof of life, until her hair’s gone sweat-damp at the edges.

He snorts a faint laugh and scatters a handful of kisses across her chest before he pulls away, his hands still busy feeling her up. “I'm glad you like it,” he says. By Hect standards, feels nice is a ringing endorsement. “Let me know when I can move?”

She nods and leans forward, rebalancing her weight as she wraps her arms around his neck and moves in to kiss him. He slips his hands out from where they're pressed between their chests and palms her ass instead, tugging her closer as she licks her way inside his mouth.

She shifts in his lap with a quiet moan, and he realizes abruptly that she's taken him to the hilt. He can feel something pressed against the tip of his dick. It takes a moment of flipping through anatomy textbooks in his mind for it to click, but–

“You can move,” she murmurs, leaning her forehead against his. He can feel her breath against his lips. “Easy, though. You're right up against my cervix. I'm due to bleed next week, so it's a little low.”

“Thought that's what that was,” he breathes, closing his eyes against the wave of heat that rolls through him. “Deep and slow, like you said. Christ, Cam. Does it feel good?”

“Mhm,” she hums. She noses at his hair, presses a kiss to his temple. He beams. “Some pressure, but pressure’s good. Feels full. I like it. Move?”

“Yessir,” he says, attempting to shift experimentally under her weight in order to assess his range of motion. He says it as a joke, but he files the thought away for future reference upon seeing how sharply her pupils dilate.

It only takes him a few ineffectual attempts at thrusting upwards to realize that this is a nonstarter. The gorgeous weight of her in his lap is effectively pinning his hips down to the bed, and he's severely lacking the sort of leverage he'd need to really fuck her. Even if he did have leverage, it's becoming readily apparent that he simply doesn't possess the coordination or the muscle mass needed for this sort of thing, at least not yet, which comes as an embarrassment if not a surprise. “Well,” he says finally, after a moment of struggle. “Hm.”

Cam laughs as she rises up on her knees, pulling almost all the way off him with a faint hiss of pleasure. “You tried,” she teases. “A for effort. Just help guide me?”

He nods. That, he can certainly do. It only takes her a handful of thrusts to find a rhythm she likes, a dizzying rise and a measured, inexorable descent. Each time he bottoms out inside her, she makes this punchdrunk little sound that tilts his entire world on its axis, degree by degree. It's not much, just an unsteady rush of breath that's faintly colored by a moan at the edges. But hearing it from her mouth again and again, each time she sinks down around him and shivers her way through a half-dozen mindless twitches of her hips, is enough to drive him borderline feral as she chases her pleasure in his lap. The feeling of hard-earned muscle shifting in her ass and thighs, flexing beneath his palms, is a revelation all its own. He uses his grip on her hips to help support some of her weight on each upstroke, as well as lend her some additional downward force each time she settles herself fully in his lap, the wondrous weight of her body atop his own, Camilla in all her eager, restless glory. He's more than happy to help her grind down on his cock, to facilitate each chance for her to truly savor the sensation of fullness and pressure. He relaxes his grip on the downstroke, though, figuring it's probably best to let her control the descent on her own terms, a gesture she seems to appreciate.

Focusing on her is doing wonders for his own stamina, thankfully. He finds it much easier to keep his shit together when he's not actively thinking about each slick, searing drag of her hips. He's close, sure– even closer now, having thought about it– but he's able to keep his own pleasure at bay for the time being, a fact he's decidedly relieved by. It's good, though, it's so fucking good it's making him dizzy, making it impossible to keep a single coherent thought in his damn head. Cam is panting above him, tits bouncing with each roll of her hips, her brow furrowed in concentration as the faintest trace of sweat starts to blossom on her skin.

“You're doing wonderfully, you brilliant, darling girl,” he murmurs, fitting one hand to the curve of her waist and bringing the other up to cradle her face. “Are you getting close? No rush, I'm just curious.”

She nods quickly, taking her lower lip between her teeth in what looks like an attempt to stifle a whimper. “Yes,” she hisses, barely above a whisper. She's trembling, a little. He can feel the strong lines of her thighs start to tense and shake where they're spread out atop his own.

“Oh, you are close,” he breathes, imbuing the words with the degree of awe and wonder they deserve. “What do you need, love?”

She does whimper, then, her hips bucking unsteadily in his lap as he slides home again. He gets the sense that her words are maybe starting to leave her, judging by the frantic, wordless desperation with which she grabs one of his hands and shoves it down towards her pelvis. He's a clever boy; he can take a hint.

He gets a hand between them to work her clit, thrilling all over again at the miracle of soft flesh, slick and oversensitive and begging for attention. If the thrill of touching her like this wasn't reward enough on its own, the feeling of her blunt fingernails digging into his shoulders as she chases after the newfound friction would make the cramped, awkward angle of his wrist more than worth it. She rides the side-to-side motion of his fingertips for a moment before growling in frustration. She drags his hand up and away by the wrist, and at first he's worried he'd somehow read her wrong, misunderstood her unspoken desire. It's a thought spiral that's promptly laid to rest when she spits, surprisingly sweet and delicate, into his outstretched palm.

“Too dry?” he hazards, cocking his head a little, and she nods. She looks thoroughly pleased and immensely relieved at having been understood even without words, and it makes his heart squeeze in his chest. It's the same feeling he always gets each time he remembers what a privilege it is to know her, to have earned her respect, to love her, to make her feel safe enough to trust him with her soft underbelly. It feels incredibly important, in this moment, that he do everything in his power to make this good for her. So he locks eyes with her as he contributes a mouthful of his own spit to the cause. She gasps at the sight, the rhythm of her hips stuttering in his lap as she stares hungrily at his hand where the glassy shine of their combined spit catches the light. He goes back to rubbing her clit side to side with spit-slick fingertips, and judging by the wrecked little sound she makes and the way her thighs spasm, it must feel even better with the added lube.

She's so, so close. Her grip on his shoulders is bruising, and he can feel the ghost of her heartbeat in the way her cunt pulses and flutters around him. She's gone quiet again, all knife-sharpened focus and screwed-shut eyes as she chases her orgasm with everything she has in her.

“That's it, darling,” he murmurs. “I know. You're almost there.” He reaches out to cup her jaw, swipes his thumb over the plush curve of her lower lip. The very tip of her tongue darts out to meet his fingertip, the softest little kitten-lick to the pad of his thumb. He remembers, suddenly, what she’d said about spit earlier.

“Cam,” he says softly, thumbing at her lower lip again. “Eyes?” He’s careful to land the upward inflection, to frame it as a question. She insists it's different when it's him, but he knows eye contact can be hard for her at times, and he’d sooner die than force her.

Her eyes blink open, a stunning flash of stone as she meets his gaze. The full weight and intensity of her attention is as overwhelming as it's always been. Like this, glassy with pleasure and dark with want, the sight of her eyes pulls a gasp from his lungs.

“There she is,” he says, a grin spreading across his face. She whines, a little, as she bounces in his lap; takes her bottom lip between her teeth to stifle it. “Open your mouth for me, love,” he breathes, gentle as anything.

He watches her pupils blow as she drops her jaw on a gasp. In the very same heartbeat, he feels her cunt squeeze desperately around him. It's a good thing she's close, he thinks. He won't be able to last much longer.

“Good,” he murmurs, low and praising. “Stick out your tongue?”

She does.

And oh, the immediacy of that obedience is– fascinating, if a touch unexpected. He files the thought away for another day, though, in favor of marveling at the glossy pink of her outstretched tongue. He pets his free hand back through her hair, and he keeps working her clit, and he spits squarely into her handsome mouth.

She cries out, and the sharp throb of her cunt serves as proof positive, the undeniable evidence of the body. She really hadn't been kidding, earlier, when she'd told him she liked that. Or liked the idea of it, at least: something in her expression makes him wonder if this might be a first, too. It all landed on her tongue, except for a single stray drop at the edge of her mouth. He goes to swipe it away with his thumb, but she dodges his touch, her eyes flashing dark in a way that looks a lot like Leave it, please, let me keep it.

She lets it sit on her tongue for a second before she swallows it down. He watches her throat work, plays with her clit as she takes him to the hilt, as the head of his dick bottoms out inside her. She slumps forward against him and sets her teeth to his trapezius with a pressure fierce enough to make his eyes sting, and the next thing he knows she's coming with a muffled, wordless cry.

“Fuck, sweet girl, that's it,” he says. He wraps his free arm around her waist to hold her close as she shakes and shakes and shakes against him. “Good job, sweetheart. You're alright, I've got you. Just ride it out, take whatever you need.”

His hand is starting to cramp, but that's frankly none of his concern, not when Cam's riding her climax out on it. He'd assumed her orgasm would trigger his own, thought surely he wouldn't be able to withstand the sustained pleasure of her bearing down around him. What he hadn't been expecting, however, was the force of her bite. It's searing, and it's good, but the novelty of it managed to catch him just off-guard enough to keep his shit together for a moment longer.

She comes, and he holds her, and she comes, and he presses kisses to the hair at the crown of her head, and she fucks herself through it, and she just keeps coming.

“God, Cam, look at you,” he breathes. Her cry of pleasure dies down into a soft, needy keen as her orgasm finally starts to fade. “You're such a marvel. Thank you for letting me give you this.” It's perhaps a strange thing to say in the moment, but his brain-to-mouth filter is well and truly offline at present. She'll understand. Besides, it's true, and Camilla's chosen to let him see her like this, raw and wild and undone. She deserves every last bit of vulnerability he has to offer in return. It seems only fair.

“Love you,” he says, once it seems to have passed for the most part. He gently slows the hand at her clit so as not to overwhelm her. “I'm right there with you, won't last much longer. Do you want to keep going?”

He feels her trace a tiny heart on his back with a fingertip in reply, and she gives the faintest little nod where her head is still buried in his shoulder. She relinquishes her bite in favor of tucking her face more fully against his neck. He catches the imprint of her teeth in his peripheral vision, and seeing it makes heat flare through his body. He likes the idea of having been marked by her. He finds he's looking forward to the bruise.

“Alright,” he says softly, lessening the pressure of his fingertips. “Gentle, just like this.”

She nods again, mouthing absentmindedly at his neck. He knows a nonverbal Camilla when he sees her, and it's safe to say her capacity for speech has left the building. That's alright; he trusts her to signal if it's too much, and he's content to let her set the pace.

She starts to move her hips again, just barely up and down, slow and easy drags that keep most of him sheathed deep inside her. He hisses at the bolt of pleasure it sends swooping through his stomach, flaring up his spine. All the banked tension between his hips pulls tight like a slipknot, roars back to searing life.

“Jesus, I'm close,” he says. And, just to confirm: “Inside?”

He feels her nod again, so firm and decisive that he can't help but laugh. She wants it, wants this, and Camilla Hect letting herself want anything at all is such a rare and precious circumstance that he has no choice but to give it to her.

They move like that for a moment more, grinding and wordless, shared breaths and skin on so much skin. His fingers slip, suddenly, on her clit, resulting in him tweaking it a little harder from a different angle, and he feels her gasp against his carotid.

When she speaks, it’s unexpected. Her tone is clipped and urgent as though she's forcing the words out, abrupt and sudden enough to startle him. “Thoughts on squirting?”

He damn near comes at the thought alone. By the grace of God he just makes a choked, strangled sort of sound instead. She must have felt the way his dick twitched inside her at the question, though, because he can feel her grinning against his skin for half a breath. Before he can quite process what's happening, she's bringing her forearm up and sinking her teeth into it.

A clear rush of fluid gushes from her cunt as she comes again, slick and hot and soaking his lap in the place where they're joined. Her walls grip tight and perfect around him, pulsing and squeezing his cock as she sighs a wrung-out little exhale around her mouthful of forearm, and that's it, he's done for.

“Fuck, Cam, I'm–” he grits out, but he's already lost to the pleasure of his balls drawing up, the moment of weightlessness before the fall. His cock throbs in time with the waves of heat and release that crash through his legs and belly. It's strong enough to make him feel a little seasick, and the rush of endorphins makes the space behind his eyes go all hot and prickly. He's distantly aware that someone is making a noise that's halfway to sobbing. Probably him, but it's hard to tell what with the ringing in his ears, the strange tinnitus that happens sometimes when it's particularly good. Cam’s petting at his hair, running her other hand along his back, soothing strokes of her palm all up and down his spine. He can feel her breath against his collarbone. It's over in a matter of seconds, but it certainly feels a lot longer, time stretching out slow and syrupy as he holds her close and empties himself inside her.

She makes a happy little sound against his skin and wiggles appreciatively in his lap, and that's– he's thrilled she's happy, don't get him wrong. But as his climax starts to fade away, the pleasure spreading out like ripples on the surface of a lake, he's so far beyond oversensitive. The added stimulation pulls an involuntary hiss from between his teeth, his voice echoing in his ears as it cracks and hitches on a proper sob, singular and fucked-out and pathetic. He grips her waist to steady her, tries to hold her still while he gets his bearings.

When he opens his eyes, he's a bit startled by how badly the room streaks and blurs. He hadn't hit the point of tears, per se– that typically only happens the first time around. But he’s decidedly misty-eyed, and it takes several blinks for his vision to clear.

Camilla presses an apologetic kiss to his clavicle before rising up onto her knees. She gingerly pulls herself off of his cock with a slight wince, her movements telegraphed and deliberate in a way that tells him she's trying her best to be gentle. She collapses to the bed and he hurriedly flops down beside her, scooting gracelessly down the bed in an effort to worm his way close to her again. It takes some wriggling, but it's not long before their bodies are nestled together, a closed circuit of tangled limbs and sweat-damp skin on skin.

They lay there for a few moments in the comedown. For a moment, with his face buried in her chest and their legs intertwined, it feels as though they're one four-legged creature, bathing in the afterglow and catching its breath. Cam wraps an arm around his waist, and the thatch of dark, lovely hair underneath it tickles his skin in a way that's altogether quite pleasant. She's still nonverbal, but every few heavy breaths one of them will start to laugh, overjoyed and exhausted and a little delirious. One of them will laugh, and the other joins in, and the cycle repeats. The context is different, sure– they're both a little tacky with come, which is certainly new, and he's toying idly with one of her nipples– but in some ways, the moment feels deeply familiar. He's spent countless hours of his life like this, tucked side-by-side with his best friend in a twin bed, giggling helplessly at everything and nothing and the absurdity of the world, shushing and setting each other off again in turns.

“We just had sex,” he says eventually, once they've managed to quiet their laughter. He sounds a little awed and disbelieving even to his own ears. “That was sex that we had, just now. At least I think it was? Holy shit. I see what all the fuss is about.” He's aiming for silly, and it clearly works, judging by the amused twitch of an eyebrow Camilla offers in response. The look on her face translates to a sarcastic Yes, Warden. Astute observation, as always. Your capacity for perception and deductive reasoning grows stronger by the day. He snorts a laugh and she pulls him closer, squeezing her arm around him a little tighter as if to say Likewise, though. With his head on her chest like this, he can hear her heartbeat, even and steady beneath her ribs. They fall silent again, for a bit.

“You know, I think part of me might have been waiting for this,” he wonders aloud, interrupting the quiet. “On some subconscious level, at least. We’ve always done new things together. Would've felt unnatural doing this with anyone else. Is that strange to say?”

Cam just shrugs. Translation: If it is, who cares? “Fair point,” he says.

She lifts a hand into his field of vision and uses it to fingerspell out a brief I feel the same way. His heart glows with fondness for her, this remarkable woman who's chosen to live her life alongside him.

He hums in acknowledgement, taking her hand and kissing the side of her index knuckle. “Do you want to talk, or are you good like this?” She knows he's fine either way; he's made that abundantly clear over the years. But the crease in her brow while she'd been signing had looked a touch annoyed, which is generally a sign that she’s starting to want her words back. If she's feeling at all frustrated, he’d like to help.

She thinks it over for a moment, then taps his wrist once to indicate the former. He knows from years of experience that the combination of sensory stimulation and patience typically helps her find her way back to her words, more often than not. He leans over and fishes around in his nightstand, searching for the jar of licorice he keeps in the drawer. (He can't stand the stuff, himself. He only keeps it around for her.) She accepts the piece he offers her, and from there he knows it's a matter of time. He's more than content to just hold her and role model box breathing until she's feeling regulated enough for her speech to return.

“I can't believe I squirted,” she says finally, breaking their several-minute streak of comfortable silence. She sounds more than a little dazed, still, and it's such a wildcard of a sentence that he can't help but laugh.

“I can,” he replies. “It was impressive, and you’re good at impressive. Did you know you could do that?”

“It's happened before, but I haven't figured out the pattern yet,” she says. “Sorry for drowning you.”

“Camilla Hect,” he says sternly. “Don't you dare apologize for greatness. Besides, if it feels good, that's all I care about.”

“Felt fucking great,” she admits, her voice low and gravelly as she shifts to stretch out her limbs. “Think I needed that. Thank you, for everything. I had fun.”

“Well, there you go,” he says. “You're welcome, and thank you. You should squirt on my face, next time. If I drown, so be it. I'd be honored. It would be a warrior's death.”

“You're unbelievable,” she says, biting back a smile. And then, wonderfully: “...I'll consider it.”

He lets out a boyish little whoop of celebration. It's juvenile and thoroughly undignified of him, but it gets a laugh out of her, full-bodied and precious, so he can't really find it in himself to care.

“We're definitely doing this again,” she says, decisively. “You're a good lay.”

“You are working with a sample size of one,” he points out. “Well, one plus some... what was it you said? Over-the-clothes heavy petting in basements? I'd be curious to know the story there, if you want to tell me. But I'll certainly take the compliment. You were wonderful, too.”

“Gideon,” she confesses. “Been a while, though. Just the once, back in high school. Tridentarius party. Don't tell her I told you.”

“Huh,” he says. “I wouldn't have guessed her for your type. I can see it, though. Consider me sworn to secrecy.”

She shrugs and gracefully flips herself over to loom above him, balancing all her weight on her forearms where they're planted to either side of his head. Being physically caged in by her body like this is enough to make a faint prickle of heat start to simmer in his gut.

“I don't know,” she muses, sounding deliberately nonchalant. “I’d say it's fairly indicative. I've always had a thing for masculine women. Feminine men, too.”

He feels– immensely happy, for some reason, at the implication that he might fall into that second category. He feels strangely seen, and it makes him blush a little, just having heard her say it. It also makes him feel wildly, blisteringly aroused, zero to a hundred in the blink of an eye, but he's pretty sure he couldn't get it up again tonight if he tried, so that thought will simply have to wait for another day. “Butches and twinks,” he jokes, nodding sagely. “Good to know.”

“Not to derail, but I think your come is leaking out of me,” she says, wrinkling her nose in distaste. Sure enough, he feels a drop of moisture land on his thigh.

“Condolences,” he says, offering her a sympathy grimace. “That sounds extremely unpleasant, I'm so sorry.”

“Don't be,” she murmurs, leaning down for a quick kiss. “If you'll recall, I specifically asked for it. I liked it. It was– nice.”

“I can buy you Plan B,” he offers, because it seems like the chivalrous thing to say.

She fixes him with a flat glare. “Palamedes. IUD, remember? There's no need. I'm fine, I promise.”

“Are you sure?”

“...You're going to feel anxious if we don't, aren't you?” she hazards, with a long-suffering little sigh.

“Regrettably, yes, it seems that way,” he says, his voice gone sheepish around the edges. “At least this first time, just to be safe?”

“Fine, if you insist,” she says, rolling her eyes. “We can get some in the morning. You have to buy me breakfast too, though. And keep me company if I get any side effects.”

“Extremely fair,” he says with a nod. “That quiche you like, from the place on Fifth?”

“Get us a washcloth, and we have a deal,” she says, with the brilliant little smile that's seemingly reserved for him and him alone. And then they're laughing, and he's hit all over again with the realization that they're still them, Camilla and Palamedes, same as always.

They decide that his comforter is a lost cause, in the end. He'll throw it in the wash tomorrow morning. They clean each other up with a damp cloth while they chat about their plans for the day, enjoying the novelty of introducing new steps to a tandem routine they've both long since memorized. And as they settle down in his bed for the night, nestled together beneath the borrowed comforter they'd dragged in from Camilla's bed, he knows they’ll be okay.