37. Chapter 37

Rey spends a considerable portion of the next four days wearing… it.

And she doesn’t come once.

It is slowly but surely driving her bonkers.

Walking, sitting down, and interacting with people while something is literally lodged up one’s bum is not all that difficult once one has gotten used to it. Taking it out and putting it back in also becomes sort of old hat when she gets the hang of lubrication charms and—unclenching.

But it’s the sensation of it. The pressure that—despite her earnest attempts at Occlumency—is constantly at the back of her mind even when she’s busy doing homework or paying attention in class. She constantly feels full and stretched out—and horribly, horribly turned on, with no end in sight.

It’s not as though she can’t get off; Ben had made it clear that she should feel free, if she truly wants to. But he hopes that she won’t, and that hope is enough to stay her hand, so to speak, because she wants to be good for him and she trusts him to guide her to that absolutely mind-blowing orgasm that is going to be well worth the wait.

It’s just that—well—she’s just so wet all the time. She finds herself scurrying back to her dorm on a semi-frequent basis to change into a fresh pair of knickers.

And, to make matters worse, Ben is suddenly everywhere.

Rey nearly chokes on her mouthful of toast the first time she sees him in the Great Hall, having breakfast at the staff table with all the other teachers, and of course this isn’t something that goes unnoticed by the other students.

“Solo eats, lads,” Jessika Pava announces. “And here I was starting to think that he was a vampire or somesuch.”

“Wonder what dragged him out of hiding,” Tallie muses while Rey stuffs more toast into her mouth to avoid being expected to contribute to the conversation. “He seems rather cheerful today, doesn’t he? Relatively speaking, I mean.”

Rey sneaks another glance at Ben. And, wouldn’t you know it, there does seem to be the barest trace of a faint yet ever-present smile affixed to one corner of his mouth.

When he catches her looking at him, the smile widens infinitesimally before he turns away.

She bristles. The man is enjoying this. He’d deigned to join the rest of the school for breakfast because he wants to watch her squirm.

He’s also around for lunch and dinner. And all the other meals the next day, and the next, and so forth.

She runs into him in the hallways, too. He’s always strolling around, seemingly without a care in the world. Chatting with the other professors, helping them carry their things. Every time he sees Rey, he offers her a very polite, very noncommittal, “Hello, Miss Niima” with an impassive face that speaks volumes only because she knows him. His dark eyes burn with the heat of their shared secret. With the illicit thrill of the knowledge that she’s wearing a plug for him under her too-short pleated skirt.

Then he saunters off, leaving her having to act normal around her friends while she’s, like, mentally bursting into flames.

Rey doesn’t want to sound too much like the heroines in those Muggle period dramas that Rose loves but—Ben Solo is being a complete and utter cad.

There is a tiny part of her that’s not completely devoid of common sense. It’s this same part that keeps whispering that she can Occlude any time she pleases. That she doesn’t need to feel all hot and bothered when she’s getting rather good at a technique that allows her to wall off her emotions.

But Rey finds herself using Occlumency only when she absolutely has to concentrate, like if she’s taking a quiz or doing groupwork with her poor, unsuspecting, innocent classmates. Before long she has to begrudgingly admit that feeling all hot and bothered is part of it. Part of the game. Part of the fantasy that she’s spinning out in her head.

Ben’s taking his sweet time, though. Rey doesn’t know whether he’s teasing her or whether he’s making sure that she’s sufficiently prepped. Still, on Thursday, she decides to take matters into her own hands, marching off to the Serpentine Corridor after Transfiguration.

Ben’s class with the second-year Gryffindors and Slytherins has just ended, and Rey hangs back to let these students trickle out of the room. Merlin, they’re all so short. She can’t believe that she’d ever been that short. And they all look so relaxed and carefree, too. No N.E.W.T.s hanging over their heads, no memories of O.W.L.s to haunt their bright eyes. These are the tiny faces of witches and wizards who have not yet taken Arithmancy or brewed anything as complicated as Draught of Living Death, who have not yet broken up with anyone or fallen out with friends or had existential crises about what to do after Hogwarts…

“Disgusting, isn’t it?” a cool, aristocratic voice drawls almost in her ear. “They’re so oblivious and happy.”

Rey jumps, looking up into a pair of pale blue eyes that gleam almost violet in the afternoon light.

It’s Aleson Gray, one of the Slytherins who’s in her year. He’s just stepped out of the D.A.D.A. classroom as well, and Rey is more than a little gobsmacked because she’s pretty sure that these are the first words that he’s ever said to her in all their time together at school. She only has a smattering of subjects with him this term, and he and his small circle of pureblood friends tend to keep to themselves.

“What’re you doing here, then?” Rey blurts out.

Aleson holds up a roll of parchment as casually as though it were a particularly elegant afterthought. “My little sister is in the hospital wing with Black Cat Flu. I’ve been retrieving coursework for her all day.” He doesn’t seem annoyed to have been saddled with this task; just bored.

Rey can’t quite recall the name of Aleson’s sister, but a face floats to the surface of her mind—nearly a carbon copy of his, with slightly pinched features and straight black hair and those haughty violet-blue eyes. She also vaguely remembers Rose mentioning that he’s fiercely protective of her.

“Sorry to hear that she’s ill,” Rey says. “Black Cat Flu is awfully contagious, isn’t it?”

Aleson smirks. “Wondering if you’ve doomed yourself to a few weeks of chronic misfortune by standing this close to me?”

“No, that’s not—I—” Rey falters, mortified—“we’re not even standing that close together—”

This, she chides herself, is why you’re not allowed to even attempt making small talk. She’s completely out of her element. She hadn’t been prepared to assure a schoolmate she barely knows that she’s not treating him or his sister like a leper while she’s got a plug up her ass in preparation for their professor to fuck it. Why is this her life?

Fortunately, Aleson soon decides to take mercy on her. “Relax, Niima. I’m joking. Kalonia’s got enough quarantine wards in place to contain a rampaging troll. And I wouldn’t dream of infecting you with bad luck so soon to your next Quidditch match, in any case—I’m not that overburdened with house spirit.”

“Oh.” Rey tries not to fidget. She’s never seen him at any of the matches, not even the ones where Slytherin is playing. “I wasn’t aware that you followed Quidditch at all.”

“I don’t, but—” Aleson shrugs—“all of Hogwarts is talking about the girl who defeated a manticore and got clobbered by the Whomping Willow within the span of a few months. Rather eventful school year for you, isn’t it?”

“Er, I s’pose…” Rey truly has no idea where this conversation is going, or why Aleson is even deigning to speak to her in the first place, or why he’s looking at her like he’s patiently waiting to be either surprised or amused or both.

“Miss Niima?”

Her head whips sharply to the left at the sound of Ben’s voice. The last of the second years are gone and he is hovering in the doorway of the classroom, both hands in his pockets and one eyebrow raised at her and Aleson.

At first, Rey can only stare. Not just because Ben looks devastatingly handsome and somehow even taller than usual in a slim-fit navy suit with a matching tie and a crisp shirt that’s so white it’s almost blinding, but also because he seems a little bit… off. His brown eyes are narrowed as they take in the sight of her and the Slytherin boy and his generous lips are pursed in—annoyance?

“What are you doing here?” he prompts. And, when she doesn’t say anything because she’s too busy trying to figure out what’s going on with him, his annoyance apparently deepens as he continues, “The hallway outside my classroom is hardly the appropriate venue for a social club, wouldn’t you agree?”

Her mouth parts in befuddlement. They do have an act to keep up when other people are around, but surely there had been no need for that—

“Entirely my fault, Professor Solo,” Aleson says in languid, supremely unaffected tones. “I just wanted to get a little bit more acquainted, but it appears that I’ve held her up when she’s here to…” He trails off, politely, elegantly lobbing the ball in Rey’s court.

Now would be a really good time for her to remember how to talk.

“Homework!” Rey squeaks. “I have a—question—about the homework—”

“Very well, Miss Niima. Please come in.” Ben steps back from the doorway, affording her space to enter his classroom. His enigmatic gaze lingers briefly on Aleson. “A pleasant afternoon to you, Mr. Gray.”

“You as well, sir,” Aleson replies. “I’ll see you later, Niima.” He saunters off with one last smirk in her direction.

Ben ventures deeper into the classroom, ducking out of sight of the corridor. He retrieves his blackthorn wand from the inner lining of his suit jacket and nonverbally casts some kind of—detection spell, it looks like, because an orb of red light materializes in the air above wandpoint and it spins and flashes, reminding Rey of Sneakoscopes, those pocket-sized Dark Detectors that indicate when someone untrustworthy is nearby.

It's only when the orb disappears that Ben relaxes and closes the door and seals the classroom with the usual magical locks and Silencing Charms. Rey observes him quietly as he does all of these, noting the furrow in his brow and his faint, terse scowl.

“I don’t have a good feeling about that Gray kid,” Ben mutters. He walks over to his desk and starts haphazardly shoving thick tomes and writing materials into his book bag. “You shouldn’t hang around him, I think he’s bad news.”

“For me or for you?” Reu asks, and Ben goes still for several long moments.

He doesn’t breathe a word when he resumes his task, but he’s quite obviously seething.

No, scratch that.

He’s pouting.

It would have been adorable—if she weren’t growing more and more exasperated with him as the minutes pass.

See, maybe Rey knows Ben better than she gives herself credit for, and she’s already experienced him being this way around her during the Seff Hellin times. The saga of Seff, as she likes to call it.

“D’you plan to carry on like this whenever I interact with some new bloke?” she presses. “Because it can hardly be avoided. This is a coed school.”

“He was flirting with you,” Ben grumbles.

“He was not!” Rey protests, aghast. “Before today, Aleson and I have never even spoken—”

“Oh, so it’s Aleson now, is it?” Ben rudely interrupts.

Rey crosses her arms in front of her chest, fixing him with a sharp glare. He doesn’t look at her until there’s nothing left on the table to stuff into his book bag. And, even then, he only glances at her before straightening up and glowering at the newly bare desk.

That’s fine. She doesn’t have any more classes for the rest of the day. She has all the time in the world.

She continues glaring at him with very extreme and very obvious displeasure.

At long last, Ben sighs. His broad, bespoke-suit-clad shoulders slump, as if the fight has been drained out of him by her angry silence.

“I’m sorry,” he says, meeting her gaze and holding it so that she will be able to see the sincerity in his eyes. “I’m being… immature.”

“Hmph,” Rey sniffs, sticking her nose up in the air the way Rose does when she’s irritated with Finn.

Ben’s expression ripples as if he’s fighting back a smile. Then, obviously remembering what’s good for him, he schools his features back into earnest contrition.

“I get a little crazy sometimes, seeing you talk to boys,” he ruefully admits. “It makes me think about how I can’t have that with you. I can’t just… flirt with you in the hallway, or whatever.”

Rey has to bite her tongue to refrain from insisting that, whatever Aleson Gray had been doing, it had most definitely not been flirting, because that’s not the point right now. Ben bows his head slightly, pinching the bridge of his nose like he’s staving off a migraine, and that’s when it hits her that he’s starting to be as affected by their situation as she is.

He then blinks wearily at her, and it seems that a thousand unspoken words that she can’t decipher are contained in that dark gaze before it is shadowed by a bittersweet sort of resignation.

“I wish that things were different.” His voice is so low that it should have been impossible to hear given the distance between their bodies, but, somehow, she feels them echoed in every beat of her heart. “But it has never been and will never be your fault. Again, I apologize.”

The last bit of exasperation that Rey had been stubbornly clinging to melts away. She goes over to Ben and latches her fingers in the silk of his navy tie, tugging him down for a kiss. Their first in several days. He hums contentedly against her lips, his strong arms coming up to embrace her.

The difficulty of their situation is a heavy weight on the back of her mind. They’d both chosen this; she had barreled straight into the risks of it. But it’s more unfair than she could ever have imagined, and for it to visibly wear on Ben is like a punch to the gut.

Rey translates every single ounce of her frustration and uncertainty into heat, which she pours into the kiss. Ben is all too happy to match the pace that she sets, the pace that gradually builds and builds. It’s not long before her black school robes are slipping off of her shoulders and pooling at her feet, it’s not long before his blue suit jacket is being tossed haphazardly over the back of the nearby chair. And maybe these moments have to be fleeting and maybe they have to be stolen, but these moments are hers and he is hers and that has to be enough for now.

“Just to be safe, I should probably check,” he says in between kisses, “but you don’t actually have a question about the homework, right?”

“No.” She strokes her fingertips along the clothed muscles of his chest while her other hand boldly squeezes the growing bulge in his trousers. “I’m here because I haven’t gotten off all week and I’m going mad.”

He pulls away to peer down at her face. He beams at her like she’s just given him the world on a silver platter. “Really?” he croaks, boyishly flushed and so, so pleased. “You didn’t…?”

She can’t help but return his smile. Can’t help but feel that the endless torture of the last several days has all been worth it, just for this. “Really,” she confirms. “You asked me not to, so I didn’t.” She takes his right hand and places it firmly on her backside, and she gazes into those eyes of his that are olive-toned in the bright spring sunshine filtering in through the classroom windows, and she thinks that these are the eyes that she can spend the rest of her life falling into, sweetly and forever.

Oh, if only.

Ben leans in and kisses her so hard that it takes her breath away. Rey lets it happen, lets his tongue do dirty things to her mouth, lets him paw at her bum and grind his erection against her belly, her spine arched like swansong as she presses her body up against his.

It's when he gives the base of the plug a sharp tap that a low moan tears itself loose from her throat. She feels his grin blossom against her lips and he taps again, taps through her too-short skirt and the fresh pair of knickers that she’d changed into before going to meet him because the first pair had been drenched beyond belief. “Professor,” she whispers, clutching at his shirtfront, her knees shaking, “please, sir, I really need to come. Please fuck my ass so I can come.”

Ben makes a small noise that… well, in all honesty, and Rey’s not being vain or anything, but it’s a sound that makes her worry for a split second that she’s killed him. It’s not long, though, before he’s stifling it against her lips, an excited little shudder wracking through his wide frame.

Her head spins as he maneuvers her around—their lips still locked—so that she’s leaning back against the teacher’s table. Time passes and hands wander and clothing is unfastened and shoved out of the way and his kisses wash over her like burning starlight until his trousers are hanging off of his hips and her white blouse is parted and he’s bent his head over her breasts, pushed up over the cups of her daffodil-yellow cotton bra, licking and sucking until little whines are bursting forth from her lips.

“Such a good girl,” he tells her in between mouthfuls. “Always my best girl. Gonna make you come so hard, baby, just you wait.”

Her heart leaps at his promise. His large hand roves under her pleated skirt, thumbing the gusset of her knickers aside and sinking a finger knuckle-deep into her wetness.

“Look at that,” Ben murmurs, kissing her again, thrusting with aching gentleness as the pleasure makes her toes curl. “You took it so well. So eagerly. This pretty cunt just swallowed your professor’s finger right up, didn’t it? Absolutely soaked. Begging for it.”

Rey groans, moving her hips against his hand. She’s abstained and anticipated for so long that it doesn’t take much more stimulation to bring her staggeringly close to her peak.

She sobs when he retracts his hand from between her legs the second that she’s on the verge. It’s not as though she’s surprised by it—she’d known that she was going to get edged at least once today, she’d known that she wouldn’t get to come if his cock wasn’t in her ass—but still she sobs, tears of sheer frustration leaking out of the corners of her eyes.

Ben is all over her in an instant. He holds her tight and he peppers soothing kisses all over her face and he rubs her back. “You’re so good, Rey, so brave,” he reassures her, over and over again. “Not long now, all right, sweetheart? I’m going to let you come real soon. Can you hold on just a little while longer? For me?”

She cries a bit harder at that but she manages to nod, trusting him completely. He coaxes her into a different position—this time, one that’s got her bent over his desk. As her exposed nipples press into the cool, hard surface of antique wood, he flips up her skirt and tugs her drenched knickers down to her knees. She can hardly breathe from the anticipation, her thighs quivering as his wand-and-quill-callused fingers run over the contours of her ass.

“I don’t think that I’ll ever be able to put into words how much this made my week,” Ben rasps. “How much it made my entire fucking life, knowing that you had this inside you while you went about your day.” He runs his thumb over the base of the plug, jostling it just enough that another spark of pleasure blazes through Rey’s core. “You’ve made me a very happy man, Miss Niima.”

She can’t help but roll her eyes fondly, remembering his gleeful, nigh unnoticeable smiles in the Great Hall and in the corridors. “I hadn’t noticed,” she quips.

“Brat.” He spanks her left cheek and then the right, each crack of his palm on her flesh resounding through the quiet classroom, each crack going straight to her clit. He repeats the process, raining down roughly tender blows like kisses, and she closes her eyes and muffles soft moans into the fold of her arms.

Once he’s painted her bum as red as he likes, he removes the plug with painstaking gentleness. It slides out of her and leaves her empty. Waiting to be filled.

She can’t see what he’s doing, but she can feel copious splatters of lubricant dripping onto her skin as he works the charm all over his length. His left hand grips one cheek, spreading her wide, and she involuntarily tenses as the slick head of his cock nudges at the entrance to where the plug had been mere moments ago.

“Relax for me,” Ben says quietly, each syllable threaded through with an urgency that he’s trying and failing to not make so apparent.

Her eyes still screwed shut, Rey takes a deep breath and does as he had requested, as best as she’s able to. It’s just like inserting your plug, she tells herself. It’s just like taking his fingers.

He slowly pushes the first half-inch forward, and her eyes fly open and she immediately arrives at the conclusion that it’s not the same thing at all.

“Oh,” Rey wheezes out. “Oh, my God.”

Ben freezes, still as a statue. “We can stop anytime,” he tells her. It sounds like he’s saying it through clenched teeth.

She shakes her head. They hadn’t gone through all of this just to stop now. “Keep going.”

And he does. It’s a testament to how much he wants it that he’s moving again as soon as she gives him her consent.

It’s like being split open. It’s like nothing she’s ever felt before.

He’s so thick. And he goes on forever. The pressure takes up almost all of the space in her head that’s usually reserved for coherent thought.

Rey can’t bite her lip because she knows that she’ll draw blood. So she gasps and whimpers and squeaks instead. She concentrates on staying still and on relaxing, she concentrates on accepting every bit of him that he pushes into her. There is one time when she sneaks a glance at him over her shoulder but he doesn’t notice, a red flush creeping up his neck from the collar of his white shirt, beads of sweat dotting his knitted brow, his dark eyes focused solely on the place where their bodies are joined.

She’s quick to shift her gaze away. She doesn’t know how to explain it, but the look on Ben’s face is so intense and vulnerable—so deeply personal—that she has the oddest sensation that she’d intruded just by witnessing it.

Finally, after a lot of delicate maneuvering, Ben stops when he’s a little over halfway in.

In all honesty, that’s probably as far as he can go for now, and Rey has no complaints.

He hunches over her, trailing soft kisses along the slope of her neck. “How are you?” he mumbles. He’s shaking. “Is this all right, am I hurting you, should I pull out—”

“No.” She turns her head to nuzzle at the side of his dear face. “Don’t pull out. Just give me a moment to get used to it.”

“I’ll give you anything you want,” Ben says roughly, all but collapsing against her. “You feel incredible. Jesus.”

Rey’s more than satisfied with that bit of praise. It could have been minutes, it could have been hours, the time that they then spend simply pressed against each other. She basks in his warmth and his strength as her body acclimates to the stretch and her brain leaps over the mental hurdles of bloody hell, there’s a dick in my bum to come out the other side where there is a great deal of curiosity as to how it would feel if he starts to move—

And maybe Ben picks up on her silent signals. Maybe he knows her better than she gives him credit for.

Because he props himself up on the elbows that are caging her in on the table, and he rolls his hips against her backside in an experimental thrust.

“Whoa,” Rey breathes out.

She doesn’t care if it sounds a tad inane.

It’s the truth.

It’s strange and somewhat uncomfortable but it’s also so new and such a thrill.

It’s whoa.

Ben thrusts again. And then a third time, and a fourth, and so on, until he’s got some semblance of a rhythm going. He sounds kind of like he’s doing pushups with the way he grunts and huffs above her. At the periphery of her vision the muscles of his arms strain like they’re livewires, like it’s a whole-body effort on his part to keep his pace slow and controlled.

Well, if there’s anything at all that Rey’s learned this school year, it’s that she has a bit of a wicked streak.

She wiggles against his hips, meeting his next thrust, for a brief and glorious and very much whoa moment fucking back against him.

And something in Ben seems to snap.

He pumps into her a little bit harder. Not hard enough to hurt, but hard enough to make her squeal. He tangles his fingers in her hair and gives the slightest of pulls, angling her chin up. “Goddamn minx,” he growls in her ear. “Fuck. God damn it. Jesus Christ.”

Each expletive is punctuated with an incrementally rougher thrust. Rey thinks that she might be beginning to understand what it means to get drunk on one’s own power.

“I’m not going to last,” he warns, sounding so angry about it that she has to hastily swallow a giggle. “Touch yourself.”

She cranes her neck to peer up at him through her lashes. “You mean I can come now, sir?”

His features spasm. With his eyes so wild like that, she starts to worry that he’s about to go into cardiac arrest. But then that expression dissipates, smoldering into heat and steel.

“Yes, Miss Niima, you can come now,” he says, and the man must really be going out of his mind if he’s not bothering to correct it to may instead. “You’ve been so good this week, keeping that plug in, waiting because I asked you to. Of course you get to come.” He presses a kiss to the back of her head. “Such an obedient little thing. Such a gorgeous, dirty girl,” he rasps. “Go ahead and play with that dripping pussy while you’re being fucked in the ass by teacher.”

Rey’s hand wanders between her legs, her eyes drifting shut.

It’s an onslaught of sensation. Her fingers kneading circles on her clit, her nipples rubbing against the desk that she’s bent over, Ben surrounding her and gently pounding into her. Soon she’s crying out and writhing with abandon, so close to her long-sought-after orgasm, losing herself, forgetting herself, giving all of herself to him, and to her great delight he grows more and more animalistic as he burns his way through.

“So tight, Rey,” Ben groans. “So goddamn tight. You have no idea. I love your freckled little ass so much and now you’re letting me stick my cock in it. Jesus. I’d keep you like this forever, if I could. I’d wear you like a sleeve.”

Merlin. The unbelievable filth that spews from his mouth sometimes. And she’s unbelievably filthy, too, because her spine arches and her fingers blur and her jaw goes slack and—

“’M gonna come, professor,” Rey slurs.

“Go ahead, baby.” Ben’s fingers fist into her hair. “Come for me.”

And she does. Exploding, unfurling, white-hot stars of pleasure blazing in the darkness behind her shut lids, her whole body going limp, limp enough that he can slide in just a little bit deeper, and the sounds that he’s making—

He sounds like the manticore in its death throes, Rey thinks distantly in her blissed-out daze as she lays there like a rag doll beneath him while he hammers into her through her aftershocks, each thrust drawing out sparks of pleasure-pain in her overly sensitized state.

“I’m going to fill you up soon, Miss Niima,” he promises hoarsely. He reaches out to touch her face, his index and middle finger prying her mouth open, pressing in deep past the lips that she automatically parts for him. “I’m going to fill you up and I’m going to put the plug back in, and you’re going to walk around Hogwarts for the rest of the day with your teacher’s come in your ass.”

It wrings a second, smaller orgasm out of her. A shivery sort of second wind. She moans around his fingers. Chokes on them. He seizes above her, spilling inside her with a strangled, triumphant roar.

This is the loudest that Ben Solo’s ever been during sex. And Rey’s never been so gratified in her entire life.

It’s the most he’s ever come, too, she thinks. His spend floods through her in a thick rush of warmth; she can feel some of it leaking out, trickling down her thoroughly spanked cheeks.

Ben manages to ease out of her and plug her back up with the Gryffindor-colored toy, but not even half of a second passes after he’s done with that and he’s suddenly just—crumbling on top of her.

His weight crushing her to his desk in the best way.

He hadn’t even been able to roll her onto her back to face him. Instead, he just covers with sloppy kisses whatever parts of her are easily accessible. Her temple, the side of her neck, her ear, and she offers up breathless little pinpricks of laughter whenever it tickles.

“How was it?” Rey languidly murmurs after a while.

Ben reaches down to pat her sore rump with a fondness that makes her heart ache. “Peachy keen,” he replies.

She snorts.