9. Chapter 9

            Rey is roused from sleep by the feeling of an arm snaking under and around her and a large, warm hand covering her left breast. She hums, quietly; her still-slumbering brain assumes that this must be a very pleasant dream. After all, the hand is exploring, not grabbing hard, and she’s relaxed, with no sense of panicky, urgent need. There’s soft, even breath on the back of her neck, tickling her ear, but even that is not unwelcome. She doesn’t open her eyes.

            Then another hand presses, full palm and all fingers outstretched, against the skin below her navel. The breath at her neck hitches. Rey shifts a little more against the silken sheets as the hand slowly slides down, down, over the coarse hair there, middle and index fingers curling in between her thighs. Now that he’s discovered where to touch her, he has no trouble finding it again. He circles the pads of his fingers around her clit, not in any particular hurry just yet. She hums again, presses her cheek against the pillow.

            Wait. Now that he— now that he’s discovered where to touch her.

            Rey opens her eyes. She’s laying on her left side in Kylo Ren’s bed.

            She can’t see Kylo, obviously, but she can feel him. Not just through the Force, sharing and feeding into her growing arousal, but against her, on her. His nose in her hair, lips slightly parted, breath a little louder and faster now against her skin, his chest against her back, his cock pressing into her hip, half-hard. And his hands, of course, working at her. Rey’s own breath catches, and she squirms. “Kylo.”

            “Mm.”

            He doesn’t stop. She doesn’t quite feel that he should, nor does she try to compel him to through their bond, or via the Force. But he could stand to at least learn something. As his touch hits home and sends what feels like a single spark zinging through her belly, she fists her hand in his top sheet and says, “You need to ask first.”

            “Why?”

            She chuckles weakly, incredulous but also not, not at all, and presses her thighs together as if trying to close him out. That doesn’t help. In fact, it only does the opposite, intensifying the friction between his fingers and her bare skin, and Rey lets out a sort of choked whine that’s all too revealing. “Because— ah, because you don’t know that I want it otherwise.”

            “But you’re already warm.” He slides his hand a little lower, slips a finger inside of her, curling and uncurling it, moving it back and forth, making her hips twitch and press into his hand. He’s a very quick study, which is a compliment, sure, but also an undeniable fact. Rey doesn’t feel too bad for thinking it.

            “Doesn’t count,” she mumbles into the pillow.

            “And we’ve already done it.”

            Another long, deft finger. It’s already so much. He’s in her veins like a fever. “Well, that doesn’t give you license to—to—”

            “Take what I want,” he prompts, with what might be a hint of something like cheekiness. He moves his left hand to her other breast, brushing his thumb over her nipple.

            “Yes, exactly.”

            Kylo kisses the back of her neck. “But I know what you want,” he murmurs. “I know your mind.”

            He pushes his cock up against her harder, with more urgency, and Rey, desiring at least some small form of turnabout, leans back into him, grinding her hips against his pelvis. He groans, and that groan reverberates through the pit of her stomach in a way she didn't even know was possible. “Well,” she says breathily, “that is cheating.”

            “That doesn’t make it any less true.” He presses his lips against her skin again, at the juncture of her neck and shoulder, but this time he sucks, hard. Rey tenses against him. She can see in his mind that his intent is to mark her, the sort of thing he knows she’ll mind later. In the moment, she doesn’t. She feels like a plasma cannon that’s been primed and is ready to fire, and he knows it, because he feels it too.

            He stops sucking at her, leaving a cold, wet spot where his mouth was. Rey misses him instantly in a way that she can’t stand.

            “But fine,” he rumbles. “Let me take you.”

            He curls his fingers again, inside her, and slides his hand down just a little, tilting his wrist to give her more of his palm to grind against. It’s tempting, so tempting, to just acquiesce, but she manages to say, between gritted teeth, “Missing a word.”

            Kylo huffs. “What is the point? You’re going to let me whether or not I’m polite.”

            He pulls back, sliding his fingers out of her and releasing her breast. Rey squeezes her eyes shut and moans, wanting, in a way that she isn’t expecting and therefore doesn’t think to control. He places a hand between her shoulder blades and pushes her over onto her front.

            “I really hate you,” she says.

            “I know.”

            She hears the fabric of the sheets rustle as he moves, his knee denting the mattress to her side, and his weight shifts as he reaches for something on his bedside table. Then he positions himself behind her and places his hands on her hips to pull them back, directing her onto her knees. He releases her to fiddle with whatever it is that he took from the table, which sounds like a jar or something else with a lid. A few moments’ pause, silent but for a quiet, sort of sticky sound. Rey doesn’t have time to look behind at what he’s doing or to reach out and read his intent before he rubs his hand against her, presses a finger back inside and something on his skin is—

            “Oh, cold,” she gasps, because that’s not what she expected.

            “Give it a moment.” And a moment’s all it needs; whatever it is quickly warms up as he works his finger in and out of her. Seemingly satisfied, he pulls his hand back and wipes it off on the sheets, then takes hold of her hips again. Rey stretches her arms out before her, then glances back at him over her shoulder, through her eyelashes. He doesn’t notice, at first. He’s too busy looking at her hips, her back, his dark hair falling into half-lidded eyes that glow with want. She takes a second to—not admire, but something like it—his broad shoulders, the way every muscle in his body tightens with anticipation like a tripwire pulled back.

            Then his eyes snap up to hers.

            “Please,” he says. It’s not really an ask, not in the flat and meaningless way he says it, but she shudders all the same. And before she has the chance to reply, he enters her.

            It’s so much easier this time. There’s so much less resistance in her body, so much less tension, because of how he’d warmed her beforehand, maybe also because of the slippery substance he’d used both on her and himself. He goes slower, too, now that he knows he can take his time with her, but she thinks he doesn’t need to. She pushes her hips up and back against him to speed things along except it is a little too fast and she gasps again and he moans, a drawn-out, resonant oh that he’s clearly not expecting to leave his lips. But he’s in her as far as she can take him for now, and they breathe together.

            He lets them both adjust this time as he slides one hand from the small of her back to her shoulders. Then he brings his hand up to her hair, gets a firm grip, like she did yesterday when his head was between her legs. Rey closes her eyes as he shifts his hips back.

            Then he yanks her hair as he thrusts inside of her and it’s so much all at once that Rey’s fingers curl into claws that rake at his bedsheets. She likes to think she was a little gentler pulling on his hair when he had his mouth on her, even though she knows she wasn’t. Still the sweetest, most wanted pain she’s ever experienced coupled with the feeling of him pressing into her makes her cry out, overwhelmed. He cries out too, although he tries to stifle it, and with a grunt he shifts his hips again, out, back in. Whatever the spot was that he managed to locate with his fingers the previous evening, he keeps brushing against with his cock and it’s so good, so devastatingly good—

            This should be more complicated, the two of them, but it’s the least complicated, most natural thing. No delicate euphemism for what they’re doing: it’s fucking, and this time it’s working the way it should. He’s more under control now, even though he isn’t, even though he hasn’t slowed down because he doesn’t know how. His movements are steady and even and there’s a rhythm to them, a pattern, as he fucks her. Somehow it’s a rhythm she already knows, that she doesn’t have to learn, and she rocks her hips back in time with it when she can. He’s not in any danger of spilling over early, not this time. He has her where he wants her, like he wants her. Like they both want. Like she wants also.

            Giving herself over to the rocking, the heat their bodies share, that’s remarkably easy. They work like this. They should have always known it, should have known when they clashed on Starkiller Base, should have known when they fought as allies in Snoke’s throne room. Maybe he did. Maybe he knew all along. The thing Rey can’t stand is giving him the satisfaction of knowing he was right. She glances over her shoulder at him again, expecting to see him looking down at her like a predator with his prey, lips curled into— something, not a smile because he doesn’t do smiles, but something primal, teeth bared like he’s about to sink them into her neck and drink her.

            What she actually sees isn’t that at all. Despite the tightness of his grip in her hair and his fingers digging into her hip, pulling them together, pushing them apart, he’s clutching at her more out of desperation than dominance. His head is lowered, yes, chin tucked down, but his eyes are closed, his lips parted, much like hers are, out of pleasure but also something close to disbelief, that they’re here, that he’s inside of her. When he opens his eyes briefly to look down at her they glitter with greed but also exhilaration, with captivation, like nothing exists at all outside of her and them. She understands now why he kept trying to shut her out, in the elevator, at dinner. Control is the opposite of this very new experience of being so lost in another person that you stop thinking at all.

            Rey stops thinking, too.

            Instead, she feels. The pressure of his hand on her hip, the way his fingers loosen on her hair and drag across her scalp as they try to regain their hold on her, his pelvis connecting with and pulling away from her hips as he moves in and out of her. He’d said that she was vocal, and she is now, thoughtlessly, wordlessly moaning her pleasure into his bedsheets, but sometimes she catches these helpless little sounds out of him when he thrusts deep into her and hits someplace new inside of her that she doesn’t know the name of and they both feel it ricocheting through their bodies like a blaster bolt. He gives up on her hair and presses his hand between her shoulder blades, pressing her face and her chest into the mattress even as he pulls her hips into him, trying to chase that down.

            And she feels, too, what he feels: how slick she is around him and how tight. Rey has little basis for comparison but assumes he must be on the larger side of average, because his cock feels like just the limit of what she can take. Whatever he had applied to them both that helped him ease in before has helped them get to where they are now, a place where he can move in and out of her seamlessly but with such delicious friction. It feels like her body was made for him, like she was always meant to fit around him. He wants to be closer, closer than close, and he pushes her flat to the bed so he can lean forward to breathe into her hair, to better cover her body with his own, shifting the angle of his hips, trying to get even deeper as he keeps bucking into her, hard.

            Rey cries out again, euphoric this time, and as she does she hears him more clearly. He still has words, somehow, but those words are just “yes,” over and over from some low place in his throat. He’s close, close, she’s deliriously close but he’s closer even by a hair’s breadth, and as the rhythm of his hips stutters she hears her name fall from his lips, just once. “Rey.”

            The rush of his own orgasm coursing through her body is what puts her over the edge, and for a long yet fleeting moment, she’s made only of starlight.

            But all stars fade, and this fades too, gradually. Kylo stops holding himself above her, or maybe he’s lost the strength, because he collapses on top of her, boneless, panting, his mouth pressed against the side of her head, to her hair, damp with sweat. He’s not dead weight, but he’s also heavy. Rey shifts slightly and barely has time to form a thought about being crushed, much less words or a phrase, before he senses it. He very reluctantly pulls out of her and moves to the side, but not far, keeping an arm casually draped over her waist.

            Rey folds her arms out in front of her and presses her forehead to them. She doesn’t open her eyes. It’s been a very long time since she’s felt this utterly at peace, spent, with no drive to fight or flee. She still feels that way even when Kylo starts moving his hand, skimming her skin with the backs of his fingers, then the pads of them, idly stroking her. Placid, not possessive. She doesn’t mind.

            “Rey?”

            “Hm?”

            He drags a finger down her back, tracing her spine through her skin. “Where is the Resistance headquartered?”

            “Mm.” She shifts her head on her arms, getting comfortable. “They’re in the No system.”

            “The No system?” he repeats, not bothering to hide his rising excitement.

            “Yes, the No system. Best-known for its largest habitable planet of ‘Not a chance,’ which is orbited by the twin moons of ‘I can’t believe you thought that would work’ and ‘Go stick it in a sarlacc.’” She opens her eyes and looks at him. “The No system.”

            He huffs and takes his hand away, turning over to lay on his back and look up at the ceiling. She immediately misses his touch, but doesn’t admit that or ask to feel it again. “I had to try.”

            “Well,” Rey says, feeling the beginning of a smile form on her lips, “now you can tell Hux honestly that you’ve interrogated me.”

            A short, sharp exhale through his nose might be the beginning of a chuckle if he just gave it some room to grow. He doesn’t look at her, but she can’t stop watching him, trying to puzzle out what makes his face work the way it does, how what should be mismatched features come together to create an impression that, upon further reflection, is not wholly unhandsome after all. Or maybe she just thinks that now, in this moment, because of how well their bodies fit together.

            “How did you know to do that?” she asks.

            He does look at her, now. “What?”

            “With the lotion. Or— was that lotion?”

            “Oh.” He frowns. “Lubricant.”

            “Right, that makes sense.” She remembers performing maintenance on her speeder on Jakku, keeping joints and hinges lubed up so that it would function properly. How often she’d needed to do that in the dry desert heat with sand everywhere.

            “Same concept,” he says, picking up her train of thought where she left it as if that’s the most natural way to have a conversation. “Different substance. It makes it easier when I’m alone, so I thought—”

            He cuts himself off when he seems to realize what he’s very nearly admitting to. She shifts onto her side, propping herself up on one hand. “You often think of me like that when you’re alone?”

            “I didn’t say that.”

            “But you do.” Through their bond she can easily feel his embarrassment, although when she tries to gently probe further he mentally swats her away. But of course he thinks of her in that context. Why shouldn’t he? It only makes sense. He wanted her so desperately for so long. “You think about me while you—” She balks at any of the crude anatomical terms she knows. They don’t feel right here. “You know.”

            Kylo brings up one hand to cover his eyes, and he sighs.

            “Is it better?” Rey asks, genuinely curious. “In person.”

            “Yes,” he says simply. “It is. By far.”

            She catches an errant thought of his, a reflection on how warm and wanting she’d been under his hands as he’d roused her, and she blushes despite having been there. It’s different when he thinks of it. He sees her in a way she doesn’t see herself at all. “Oh.”

            He rubs his eyes, his forehead, agitated. “So you don’t think of me?”

            “What?”

            “You never thought of me.”

            “Well, no. But—” He turns his head to face away from her, already sulking. She chews on her lower lip, but she makes herself finish, marveling at how she actually wants to have this conversation with him of all people, and how easy it feels. Just because they’ve been intimate, she tells herself. It’s only easy to talk about sex because they’ve had it. “I don’t really think of anyone. I don’t really do that.”

            He looks back over. “You don’t touch yourself?”

            Rey shakes her head, shrugs. “Not since I was a teenager. Sometimes I’d do it so I could get to sleep. The rush and then relief, it helped. But it was always this abstract thing. I’d think about stars, about other worlds. About flying. Some sense of— cosmic belonging, I suppose.” That’s more personal than she’d meant to go. She pulls back. “I don’t need help sleeping these days. I’m busy enough and it tires me out.”

            She can tell he doesn’t understand. Regardless of how much sleep he does or doesn’t get, he’s all emotion that needs venting, not unlike the cracked kyber crystal in his lightsaber. The fire that fuels him will keep burning even though she can feel that parts of him are achingly, desperately weary. She’s been in his body. She knows.

            “You will now,” he says, interrupting her thoughts.

            “What?”

            “You’ll think of me now,” he says, “and you’ll touch yourself.”

            She doesn’t know what bothers her the most: the arrogance, the presumption, or the fact that he’s probably not wrong. “If you let me live,” she points out.

            “Right,” he agrees with no trace of irony. “And I won’t. So in your remaining days.”

            “Well, if you ever let me alone.”

            “And I won’t,” he says again, rolling to her, kissing her neck and starting it all over.

            At some point, there’s a buzz from the comm unit by the doors to Kylo Ren’s chambers. Kylo disentangles himself from Rey and sits up, and it’s like the air between them cools; suddenly he’s very far away from her. Rey, laying on her belly, watches him, watches him work his jaw, swallow, as if this time it’s him remembering how things are supposed to be between them and how dangerous it would be for anyone to witness how they actually are. She pulls one of his pillows toward her, tucks her chin into it, and sighs.

            Kylo swings his legs over the side of the bed, facing away from her, and for a moment he just sits there, squaring his shoulders, hands still planted on the mattress. The muscles in his back tense. Now that they’re no longer touching she’s aware again of how sore she is, not just where she’d expect in her hips and thighs, but everywhere. She wonders if he feels the same way, but he has his guard back up and she can no longer access his body. There might be two components to the transfer of feelings and sensations that occur when they have sex, not just physical contact, but emotional exposure. Literal and metaphorical nakedness.

            He pushes himself up to stand, then crouches down to locate his black clothing on the black floor. For the first time, Rey finds herself wondering when he fully disrobed. She remembers them kissing the previous evening, and then she fell asleep — she had been so tired, and at that point it had been almost a full day since she arrived. Had he removed his trousers and his boots all the way and slept next to her naked, or had he only undressed in the morning, to wake her with the length of his body pressed to hers?

            Now he pulls his shirt on and steps into a pair of trousers that look clean. After he does them up all the way he hesitates, seeming to wonder if he should dress further. He glances at her, still in his bed with the covers pushed down around her waist, and decides against it for now. He walks around the bed in his lurching way, as if he shifts his entire weight from foot to foot every time he takes a step, past the dividing panes of glass and the uncomfortable sitting room furniture. Then he places his hand on the panel to turn on the lights and open the door for whoever it was that buzzed.

            A silent, robed attendant pushes in a hovering cart laden with covered trays. If the attendant takes note of Kylo’s state of relative undress, or Rey completely naked in his bed, they make absolutely no indication. They push the cart over to the low sitting room table and begin unburdening it, arranging the trays so that the largest is in the center orbited by the smaller ones. Kylo supervises this process in silence, hands at his sides, making no indication of approval or disapproval as the attendant begins removing the lids from the trays. Rey cranes her neck around and sees a large bowl of what appears to be some sort of blue porridge, thin slices of meat that she can smell from the bed, which make her stomach growl, and a couple of varieties of fruit, along with various jars and containers whose contents she can’t identify. Then three jugs of liquid, one of which, by its scent, is definitely caf.

            The attendant sets down one place setting, then another without comment, before pushing the cart, now bearing only tray lids, through the open door and shutting it behind them.

            Kylo looks over at Rey, expectantly, and she shifts under the full weight of his gaze. She turns over and sits up, pulling the sheet to her chest, then says, “I’ll dress first.”

            “Right,” he replies, as if it genuinely had not occurred to him that she would want to. He crosses back into the bedchamber and pushes open the closet panel. She notices immediately that she was not far off in her assumptions of what would be in his wardrobe, although there do also seem to be some lighter garments for training. What does surprise her is that the rest of the clothing she picked out yesterday, everything that hadn’t been hastily removed and pushed onto the floor, is already hanging up next to his.

            “Your things are here,” he nods at them. “And here.” He indicates a black bureau tucked half-behind the paneling that Rey had not noticed. The closet is far deeper than she'd thought.

            “Great.”

            He just stands there and looks at her.

            “Privacy,” she says. It’s not a request, because she knows if she phrases it as one he’ll push back against granting it. After all, they’ve already seen each other unclothed. Still, there’s something more intimate about the act of dressing that she’d observed in him. When he dressed he took his focus off her for a moment, and that’s a different kind of vulnerability.

            Since it’s not a request and there’s no room for argument, he just nods, quickly picks up his remaining articles of clothing, and strides off to the sitting room. She tracks him with her eyes until she sees him sit at one of the place settings, back turned to her as he pulls his tunic on and bends to pull his boots up. That’s when she eases her way out of the bed. Oh— her thighs definitely ache more than they did yesterday, and she groans, but softly, not wanting to broadcast her discomfort to him. She’s had much worse. This is just new, and she’ll get used to it.

            Rey walks gingerly over to the closet and considers her options, such as they are. Obviously, she could just go with her uniform of trousers, shirt, tunic or jacket. But she remembers Nara Ordula and the idea of making your enemy underestimate you, or at the very least drawing their focus elsewhere. She glances over at Kylo Ren, who, now that there seems to be no chance of getting her back to bed for the time being, is fully clothed again. She can’t quite put herself at ease with the idea of being underdressed around him, but she considers the way he thinks of her body and decides it’s worth a try. Maybe a lack of clothing will prove to be its own kind of armor, like in the Golden Chain story, which Rey now itches to ask Leia about.

            She opens the drawers of the bureau until she finds the one that’s full of her purchases from Ordula’s, neatly folded, and she picks out the more elaborate bra and the matching black shorts. It takes her a couple of tries to fasten the clasps, and she wonders how Ordula did it so easily. Practice, perhaps. She chews on her lower lip and reaches for that semi-translucent dark green robe, pulling it around her shoulders. Even though the robe is long enough to trail on the floor behind her, it fastens so loosely in the front that Rey feels like she could throw it off and have freedom of movement if she needed it. That’s something.

            Her hair should stay down for now, she decides, so this is all that needs doing. She walks over to where Kylo is sitting and unceremoniously takes her place at the other table setting, in one of the very uncomfortable chairs. Kylo, who had been reaching for the serving spoon for the porridge, freezes when he sees her, his mouth ajar.

            She nods acknowledgement at him, like a much more poised and elegant version of herself, and he clears his throat. “Caf or—” His voice seems to fail him, and he clears his throat again. “Caf or no?”

            “No,” she says, and then she adds, “thank you.”

            He nods, eyeing her. It seems like he’s wondering but not suspicious. Possibly too distracted to be suspicious of her motivations for wearing this costume around him, but that remains to be seen. Ordula was right about this being its own kind of power. “Water or fruit juice?”

            “Oh, juice.”

            He pours some into the clear glass at her place setting, then pours himself caf into a more substantial ceramic cup, steam rising from it as he does. Rey watches, sipping her juice, as he begins serving himself, ladling the porridge into a shallow bowl, placing more than half the sliced meat onto the large plate beneath it. But instead of arranging the fruit next to the meat on the plate, he spoons it out on top of the porridge. Rey takes note of this and quietly copies him, ladling porridge into the bowl, placing the rest of the meat on the plate, fruit on the porridge, and when she’s done she notices him watching her again.

            “Here.” He reaches for one of the jars, one that has a shaker top with large holes. He shakes a bit of the contents onto his porridge; it looks like some kind of reddish baked grain. He holds it out to her. “For texture,” he says.

            She takes it and does the same, shaking the grain out on top of the porridge. Texture isn’t something she gives much thought to when it comes to food. Once she places that back on the table, she looks up to find him holding a lidless jar with a small serving spoon. There’s a clear substance inside, dotted with air bubbles. “This you might like. It’s sweet.”

            “All... right.” Rey accepts the jar and moves the spoon around in the substance, experimentally. It’s thick, like some sort of nectar.

            “Put it on the fruit.”

            “Right.” Rey picks up a small amount with the spoon and drizzles it on top of the fruit on her porridge before setting it aside. “Is that everything?”

            “Yes.”

            “Good. I’m starving.”

            She thinks she sees his mouth twitch, but still no smile. His lips just tighten into a straight line. Well, what does does she care if he smiles or not?

            He hunches over himself to spoon up some porridge and a piece of fruit. That seems uncomfortable, given the low height of the table. Rey just pulls the entire bowl into her lap and begins eating. He’d been right about the nectar, and the grain thing; the creaminess to the porridge is complemented by the tartness of the fruit, then offset by the sweetness of the nectar, and the crunch of the grain just enhances the entire experience, adding a new sensory dimension. Delighted, she makes a pleased, utterly unselfconscious little sound at the richness of the meal. She chews, swallows, scoops up another big spoonful from the bowl on her knees, and keeps eating.

            When about half the bowl is gone, she becomes aware that he’s looking at her. His own food is largely untouched. “Your clothes are different,” he says at last.

            Rey just blinks at him for a second and swallows down porridge, unsure of what she can say to such an obvious observation. “Yes.”

            “That isn’t like you.”

            “Oh.” Rey looks down at herself, and hates how she suddenly feels so foolish for thinking this would work. “That’s true.”

            He leans across the armrest of his chair and reaches over her bowl to touch her abdomen through the sheer fabric of her robe. His hands are gloved again. She inhales, and those muscles tense. “I don’t mind looking at your body,” he says.

            “Well, I don’t— dress for you,” she says, her voice a little sharp. That’s not really what she’s doing now, is it? She’s adopting different armor, adapting to her circumstances. It’s not the same. Still, there’s that little niggling voice in her head that says, Isn’t it?

            “Hm.” He pulls his hand back and looks her over again, and then he inclines his head at the bowl on her knees. “The incongruity,” he says. “That’s you. Alluring and… uncouth.”

            Rey puts her spoon down in the bowl and looks at him. She lets uncouth sit for now. There’s a much more interesting angle to examine. “You think I’m alluring,” she says.

            “Well,” he begins, obviously flustered. “No, I—”

            The tinny voice over the intercom at the doors interrupts him. “Supreme Leader, General Hux.”

            Kylo seems to welcome the distraction. “Send him in.”

            Rey hurriedly puts her bowl on the table. “Wait—”

            The doors open, and Hux stalks in, hands clenched into fists. He looks displeased about something, but then, when doesn’t he? Rey leans back and instinctively fists one of her hands in her lap, throwing an arm diagonally across her torso, before she makes herself unfold and stiffly set her arms at her side. She doesn’t want to give him the satisfaction.

            “Leader Ren,” Hux says. “We’re awaiting you in the—”

            He stops, seeing Rey. And then he looks between them, at Kylo. Back at Rey, taking in her apparel, the mark Kylo had sucked into her neck. Even though Rey makes herself remain exposed, she leans even further away from him as if she could sink through the back of the chair. “Well,” he says. “What have we here?”

            His gaze abruptly jerks away from her as though yanked by an invisible hand, which isn’t too far off from what must have happened. One of Kylo’s hands is also curled into a fist. “No.”

            Hux coughs, then composes himself. “Forgive me, Supreme Leader,” he says, although he forms those words like they’re the most distasteful thing to have ever been in his mouth. “Simply admiring your handiwork. It seems as though the taming is coming along well.”

            Rey snorts the most uncouth snort she can muster and turns her head away.

            Kylo glances at her, then looks at Hux. “We’ll have what we need from her soon enough. In the meantime, I assume you yourself are able to tell me what the other generals have to say?”

            Hux forces his hands into a more respectful position behind his back. “I… understand why you wouldn’t want to leave your chambers,” he says, “but at the very least before we have this discussion you should have her sent away.”

            “Where would you have her sent?” says Kylo, as though the idea had genuinely not occurred to him. Which, in all probability, it had not. “The security systems are strongest here. Nowhere else can hold her.”

            “Nowhere else—” Hux breathes sharply through his nose. “Fine. Then would you give me the great pleasure of accompanying me to the meeting? The girl can and will wait. As you said, she’s confined to these chambers.”

            Kylo gives Rey one last look over. Rey does not turn her head to look back at him. “Fine,” he says. “We’ll resume when I return.”

            “I hope you choke,” she says, and it’s not playacting. She can’t believe he’d let Hux enter when she’s exposed like this. Well, she can, but that doesn’t make her skin crawl any less.

            Kylo doesn’t reply, but she senses balance shift again. There’s an air of disappointment. In her? She’d rather he be disappointed at himself. Her reaction is not unreasonable. Either way, he just stands and stalks out of the room with Hux on his heels.

            The doors close, and Rey looks down at her half-eaten bowl of porridge. For once in her life, she opts to do something else instead of finishing her meal, and goes to put her clothes back on.

            By the time Kylo returns to his chambers what must be hours later, Rey is showered, fully dressed, and bored out of her skull. There’s more to his security systems than meets the eye, more than just that keypad — biometric coding, perhaps? — because she combed the room and found no loopholes to exploit in the event that she needs to escape. She also comes to realize that he must have at least had the forethought to secure all of his things before putting her in his room, because there’s not so much as a single gadget for her to play with. Objectively, this is wise if he’s at all familiar with her background as a scavenger and more specifically her particular affinity for machinery; she wonders if he ever went back to Jakku to see where she grew up. Probably did. She’s no slicer, but she could stir up a little trouble, and they both seem to know that.

            Rey does not particularly feel like being objective, seeing as all she has to do is sit and stew. She still cannot fathom why he would let Hux into the room. After all, it wasn’t as if he wanted to show her off to him—he’d torn Hux’s attention away from her, literally. Unless he wanted Hux to get the quickest glimpse, to know what he was missing out on, to inspire jealousy…

            Except he likely didn’t put that much thought into it at all and he just wanted to avoid an uncomfortable conversation with her. Frankly, knowing him, it’s the most probable option. What a bucketbrain.

            And this impression is only reinforced when Kylo Ren returns, because he bypasses the sitting room entirely and heads straight to the bed to try to kiss her and start something. Rey, seated with her knees folded into her chest, turns her face away and brings her shoulder up to her ear to cut off his access to her. Even though she can’t see his face, she can feel the weight of his frown.

            But he doesn’t press the issue. He’s capable of learning, at least, and he’s learned that trying to compel or question her won’t give him the outcome he wants. So he straightens and stalks back into the sitting room with only a grumble of dissatisfaction.

            She expects to hear more slamming, more things being thrown, but she doesn’t. Instead, she hears him rummaging around in the drawers and shelves she’d tried to open when he was away. She couldn’t access them in the end; the Force has its limits, and lockpicking is one. Too much finesse. He must find what he’s looking for after a minute, because the rummaging stops, and she hears him walk back across the room and set something down hard on the table.

            Rey’s ears very nearly perk up, because she knows that telltale rattling. That’s a toolkit. He’s brought out a toolkit.

            A slight amount of suspicion tugs at the edges of her thoughts, for what better way to lure her out of the bedchamber than by appealing to one of her skill sets? But it’s not enough to outweigh the overwhelming curiosity of what he’s possibly doing with a toolkit. Rey unfolds herself and walks to the glass panes.

            Kylo sits on the couch again, in the same spot he’d sat in for their late breakfast. He has the toolkit open on the low table and is turning his lightsaber hilt over and over in his hands, eventually pausing to run his thumb over the veiny red wire that snakes up along the outside. He sets it down on the table and hunches forward, taking two delicate, slender metal tools and prying them into the gap in the casing, moving them around. Trying to diagnose a problem.

            Eventually he surfaces one end of the red wire, and she can see that it’s burnt out. Could be a short, could be corrosion. Could just be that it was too loosely connected. Either way, it needs replacing. Very carefully, he begins undoing the connection near the pommel cap and pulling the wire free.

            Rey takes a few steps forward to get a closer look. She knows more about the anatomy of lightsabers now that she’s build her saberstaff, but she’s not entirely sure what this external red wire does. Every lightsaber is custom-built, after all. If she had to take a guess, she’d presume it to be some sort of power cable. It might direct additional power to the kyber crystal mount, or the quillion emitters — that seems like something he would want to do, under the assumption that more is better. Or it might connect a circuit that diverts power away, keeping the saber from growing too unstable, which would lead to a very nasty explosion.

            But the crystal couldn’t be positioned right between the crossguard blades, could it? On Luke’s lightsaber, or Anakin’s, the one she’d disassembled to make her own, there were several components that Kylo wouldn’t have any room for. No cycling field energizers, no modulators that would allow for adjustment of the blade’s power or length, although of course he probably wouldn’t have use for any setting other than “lethal.” Still, that’s a raw, untempered blade. The thing must want to jump out of his hand every time he activates it.

            She peers over his shoulder at the gap, trying to scrutinize. Without thinking, she asks, “Can I see it?”

            He very nearly jumps out of his seat, startled, and Rey realizes that he’d been so absorbed in his work that he hadn’t sensed her coming up behind him at all. And then it hits her that he isn’t doing this to bait her, but that there is a part of him that in times of turmoil reaches for something he can fix or break with his hands. Like she does.

            But he says, “No.”

            Of course it’s a refusal. Rey would say the same thing in his position. She tries to clarify. “I just, I meant—”

            “You must think me foolish.”

            Rey’s brow furrows. He’s so stubborn. “I was only offering to help.”

            “I don’t need your help,” he retorts.

            “Fine.” Rey crosses around the sofa and sits down in the chair she’s gravitated toward so often that it might as well be hers. She folds her arms and tries not to pay attention to whatever he’s doing, with limited success.

            And he tries not to pay attention to her, either. He measures out a length of red wiring and uses the cutters to clip it, keeping his eyes forward. Then he strips it at each end and sets about reattaching it in the old one’s place, using the same slender tools as before. Rey’s old equipment on Jakku had been much more crude than half the things in his toolkit; she didn’t have the luxury of precise instruments. She’s a bit mystified to see him doing any work that would require delicacy with his temperament, his large hands. Then again, a voice in her head reminds her, he had managed to play her like a vioflute earlier that morning.

            Kylo Ren finishes his work and puts the tools aside, and that’s when he notices her watching. Rey turns her head away, but it’s too late. He closes the toolkit with his eyes still on her.

            “Your saberstaff,” he says. “How did you construct it?”

            She shifts in her seat. “So we can only have a conversation on your terms, I suppose.”

            “We only have sex on yours.”

            “That’s how sex works,” says Rey. “It has to be on both our terms and your terms seem to be ‘all of the time,’ regardless of what I feel.”

            He blinks at her, pushes the toolkit a foot or so down the table, and sits back. “I don’t know why you’d feel otherwise. You enjoy it.”

            Rey hisses through her teeth. “Because you invited Hux who is a loathsome creature into the room while I wasn’t wearing any clothing, and then you left me stranded in here alone for what must have been the entire afternoon.”

            “You’re my prisoner.”

            “Well.” Rey folds her arms once more and looks away from him, cheeks burning. She feels foolish again and she hates it, but of course he’s right. She doesn’t know why she thought they were past this point. “Fine. That’s true.”

            “It is true.” He shifts on the couch and moves closer to the chair she’s seated in, but remains silent for an uncomfortable few minutes. When he speaks again, he says, “He is loathsome. Hux.”

            She huffs.

            “And I didn’t let him look at you.”

            “After a good five seconds of staring.”

            Another stretch of quiet, then: “Is it so horrible that I want others to know what I have?”

            Rey looks back at him. His dark eyes are fixed on her, intense. Her heartbeat picks up. She’s pretty sure he’s trying to rationalize a decision he made in the heat of a moment, but this was a possibility she had considered. She’s irritated with herself for feeling anything close to flattered hearing him articulate it. She is not some object, some prize to be flaunted.

            “We’ve been over this,” she tells him. “You don’t have me.”

            “But I have had you,” he reminds her, as if she might have forgotten. “And I will have you again. When— you consent.” He says it haltingly, like the words are new to him. “So I don’t see why using the present tense should make such a difference.”

            “Because you’re using ‘had’ and 'will have’ sexually but when you say you ‘have’ me you mean…” She blinks. “Oh, are you being deliberately obtuse?”

            He shrugs.

            “That isn’t like you,” she says. It is, disconcertingly, almost like he might possess a sense of humor.

            “That’s true.”

            “Usually when you’re obtuse it’s not deliberate.”

            That crease appears between his brows again. “Hm.”

            “You did call me ‘uncouth’ earlier,” she points out. “You can let me have ‘obtuse.’”

            A strange look crosses his face. “That’s not— the only thing I called you earlier,” he says awkwardly.

            She cocks her head at him and leans toward him a little. “So you did mean it. You think I’m alluring.”

            “That isn’t what I said. I only said I called you something else.” He leans forward too, now. They’re almost close enough to kiss, but they don’t. “The least you could do is compliment me in return.”

            Rey scoffs. “That isn’t how this works.”

            “How does it work?” His eyes search hers. “Rey. How does it work? Who makes the rules?”

            She doesn’t say anything.

            “I do,” he says. “You surrendered to me.”

            “You like to think you do,” she snaps, before she can make herself swallow it down. It’s too uncomfortably close to the truth for her to just spit out like that.

            Luckily, Kylo doesn’t notice. He looks past her, over her shoulder, where the door to the dining room must have opened. “We’ll go to dinner together now, and then later I’ll have you again.”

            “You can’t just say those things as if you know they’ll come to pass.”

            “But I do,” he says, eyes sliding back to her face. “Because those are things you want also.”

            He stands and brushes past Rey, leaves her opening and closing her mouth, trying to work out a good rebuttal. She can’t come up with one, and growls, frustrated, instead. She’s not entirely sure she’ll be able to bear desiring him and having him know about it. It makes him so much more insufferable.

            Rey has half a mind to skip dinner out of spite, but when she catches the scents wafting out of the dining room she can’t bring herself to do it. She so rarely turns down food, and she hadn’t finished their late breakfast, so she stands up and begrudgingly goes to eat. And later, after sitting next to him in silence for the duration of the meal, their eyes meet over dessert, and his little finger brushes hers. It's the slightest, briefest touch, and the only excuse she needs.

            She doesn’t turn him down, either.