#this was edited in a feverish daze so if you find any mistakes

[yeyinde]

circle the drain | Captain John Price x F!Reader

》 WARNINGS: SMUT 18+ — P-in-V sex; unsafe sex; gendered female reader, female gendered anatomy; implied power imbalance; no substance only smut SUMMARY: Somehow, you know his hands are the only things capable of keeping you whole. 》 WORD COUNT: 7,6k 》 NOTES: This was supposed to be a valentine's day gift, but it's super late on account of me being ridiculously sick. I'm also becoming the Patron Saint of "soon-ish" but this is the sequel to Caught p., i. Yeah. That fic that's been requested a bunch lmao. ANYWAY. It's FINALLY here. This was written in a day and edited under a feverish delirium in what feels like four months but was actually less than 10 minutes.

His hands are firebrands, fingers the lit end of a cigar. When he touches your skin, you hear the sizzle of your flesh burning away, and the pop of it cauterising under his blistering heat. He seals a little part of himself in the wounds he wrought: buries them deep in your dermis until they leak into your bloodstream. 

There is no victory in this. 

And yet—

"Fuck me, captain—"

—you just can't help yourself sometimes. 

His eyes flash. "I didn't tell you to stop."

》 Caught p., i

MASTERLIST | JOHN PRICE MASTERLIST | AO3

It's the firm press of his front against your back that starts it all. 

His hands, rough, firm. Scorching. They drop to your shoulders, one palm sliding down your bicep, fingers curling over the soft skin in the crux of your elbow. 

You try not to tremble when his broad back presses flush to your spine. When he ducks his head down, bending a little at the waist to reach you—Price is a mountain, a tower—and you feel the coarse hairs along his jaw, chin, scratch against the soft curve of your neck, the back of your ears, your cheek. 

"Steady."

Your teeth snap tight together when you feel the rumble through his ribcage before he even opens his mouth to utter the words. The rasping little groan—mmh—he makes rolls over your spine, the back of your ribs. It rattles through your bones, clotting in the fibrils of your tissue. 

The fluttering wings of a hummingbird beat in the cavity of your chest when he speaks. 

"One…two notches higher." 

You scent burning sycamore when he breathes out, the rasp of his breath brushing your shoulder. Heat bleeds into your spine when he sidles close to you, hands firm on your body as he strings you into the position he deems best. 

You wonder, then, how those broad hands would move you around in a different context. How the unyielding press of his chest would feel naked against your back—

"—y'right?" 

Squeaking out a clipped affirmative is all you can do amid the roiling currents that batter through your chest—a dizzying concoction of want, need, for the man pressed against your spine. 

He rumbles again, his pitch a guttural whisper that seems so opposed to his very essence—Týr in flesh and bone; a behemoth on the battlefield yelling himself hoarse—and the slow, smoky roll, the muted murmur, makes your toes curl. Fingers itch. 

"Yeah?" He presses, unwilling—or unable—to let go until he's satisfied, until the worry in his chest over his men, over you, is abated. Shifted to some other place where it can't distract him. He leans in closer, and you find notes of Tobacco and malt nestled amongst the cindered Sycamore. Psalm ashes tickling your nose. 

"Yes—," it's barely more than a breath. A ghost of something you can't place. 

When it comes to Price, you never sound like yourself. Breathless, breathy. Voice a whisper amid the rumbling clatter of a rockslide careening down a mountain. His very presence seems to syphon the air from your lungs until you're gasping. 

It feels like you've run a marathon—throat throbbing like an open wound; infected and raw. The taste of heme wells on your tongue. Your lungs burn. Ink blots clot over your vision. 

"I'm—yeah, I'm good, cap." You say, and try not to focus on how his proximity makes you dizzy. Desperate. 

He feels good against you, and you can feel the smoulder of his body even through the thick layers of his tac-vest, his military-issued jacket, and his long-sleeved shirt. The heat is dizzying. Liquifying your sense of propriety, decorum; it leaks over your threadbare resolve—that brassbound lockbox where you keep all of your hidden secrets tucked inside a place no one, nothing, can touch it. 

It's absolute hot—one decillion, four hundred and twenty nonillion degrees celsius—and, well—

Who can withstand the hottest possible temperature matter can reach?

The box isn't just burnt or turned to ash—but erased. Swallowed whole by the flames that spark so hot, they don't even leave behind a scorch mark but burn the platform it laid on, too.

It frees everything you struggled to keep bound within you when he steps back, when there's more distance between his thundering heart and your liquified spine than ever before. A chasm. 

Your chest is a hollow crevasse, an inexistent hole, and when he steps back, you feel threads of absolute zero snake over the scorched flesh. 

You hear the sharp inhale through tobacco-stained teeth when you add sir, and wonder if he feels the same chill clot inside his marrow that you do. 

When you swallow, his eyes drop, flashing to the smooth column of your throat. Liquid puddles in those sapphire pools—cenotes framed in burnt umber—and the burn of his eclipsing pupils makes you feel like you're choking.

Price clears his throat, his eyes skirting away from you in a mockery of something disquieted, demure. The loss of his eyes on you makes something sour twist in your guts. 

You want it back, you think, and know, then, that it's far too late. That whatever tenuous hold you had over yourself had been carbonised and charred to cinders when he touched you with his molten hands, melting that gossamer of resolve you clung. 

And—

Fuck. 

His eyes are fixed somewhere on your forehead—either unwilling or unable to look you bare in the eye, and you worry for a moment that he knows. That he can see the want in your gaze, the heavy weight of sin that rolls over your shoulders until they quiver. The want in your hands makes your fingers tremble.

But it dissipates when he offers a facsimile of a smile. 

"Good work," he says, the words sticking to the nicotine in his throat, and you wonder if you could become addicted to smoke just from the fumes he exudes. 

(You feel the itch in your veins for the smooth draw of smoke into your burning lungs when he moves away from you.)

Fuck—you think, eyes fixed on his broad back, his taped waist, heavy shoulders—indeed. 

You've never smoked a cigar before, and somehow you find yourself feening for a hit, for the smooth curl of tobacco smoke in your throat, sticking to your teeth. 

Your eyes are drawn to the flash of orange in a perfect ring of controlled fire, to the stem of dark brown clenched between an even thicker thumb and forefinger; the lips pursed around the butt, the beard peppered with ash. 

The craving hits you harder than ever when you look at him: the complete picture of your leader, captain, hunched over a bed of papers and files. 

It's when the ashlar blue of his gaze flickers up, catching the end of something Soap says, that you know, without any sense of uncertainty, that all the cigars locked inside his case wouldn't be enough to quench the hunger in your chest. Rapacious. Greedy.

(Greedy hands, they'd say when you took too much.

Your joints burn with the urge to cling, to hold.)

Price looks up, catching your wanting gaze. He holds it for a moment, just long enough for you to forget how to breathe, how to function. Something shudders over the thin veil of indifference he wears, sealed over his face like a scab. It splits, peels back until the oozing wound below is once again exposed to the open air. 

Raw, pulsating. 

You wonder what would happen to your mortal body if you syphoned the ichor of Tyr, let it pool on your earthly tongue. 

Your mouth is dry. Lips chapped and numbed. Your tongue lashes out, wetting them. A distraction—an unconscious action. You've studied enough to know that chewing on your lips, nails, the inside of your cheeks until the skin splits and bleeds is a self-soothing mechanism to abate the flood of anxiety that rips through you. Still. You do it, anyway. 

It's a trick of the light, you think, when his eyes dim, lowering down to your blood red mouth, narrowing at the tease of your tongue flicking across your trembling bottom lip. 

A manifestation, a delusion.

When you want something so badly, your mind is startlingly, debilitatingly, adept at playing pretend. 

Your gaze drops to your unfinished plate, and you struggle to pretend you're not losing your mind to the whims of your desire because for a moment there—a brief, almost imperceptible second—it almost felt like he wanted you, too. 

You bum a cigarette from Soap, and try not to think about that cold, windy night in Cairo when Price dropped his cigars to save you. 

The barking laugh that hacked from his soot-stained lungs when you found a pack of Cleopatra Lights in the warehouse you were hiding in. 

"Ain't the same, love." He huffed, white teeth flashing in the blue-green light of the Azbakiyyah quarter spilling in through the smeared windows. "No substitute for the real thing." 

You take a drag, and sputter over the side of the balcony, gasping and coughing through the thick musk of tobacco that chokes your lungs. 

It does nothing to abate the hunger inside of you. 

With tar-stained lungs, and nicotine glueing to your aching throat, you think: no, not the same at all. 

(Once you get a taste of the perfect vice, love, no imitation can compare. Keep the cigs. They'll only make me anxious if I start smokin' 'im now.)

The itch in your joints becomes too much. 

You slide your fingers over your flesh, and wish it was him—

Your head lifts, glancing once more at the entranceway to the changing room. 

Liquid sapphires. Brow drawn tight. 

Your heart stutters. "C—captain, I—"

His eyes flash. "I didn't tell you to stop."

It's curt. Direct. Blunt. Everything he is—all narrowed down into this claustrophobic space that fogs with steam; the walls bleeding with condensation. It's sticky, balmy. Feverish heat that prickles hot and cold against your skin. 

He says: I didn't tell you to stop. 

And you say: I didn't tell you to watch. 

An impasse. Stalemate. No victor, no loser. 

(Except you. Always, always you.)

This promises nothing but your ruin should you let your arms drop from the tight clench around your bare breasts, nipples hardened, prickled and sensitive from when your delicate, small fingers rubbed at them and dreamed about his mouth. 

An invitation. 

One you can't bring yourself to open. The envelope is ripped, torn. But the card is folded neatly on the table in front of you. 

(Take a peek, it beckons when he shifts, the unmistakable outline of his thick, hard cock bulging through the fabric of his trousers. Just a little look. A little taste.)

But it won't be, will it? Just a little. Laughable. Don't be stupid. 

You never learned how to say no to yourself, how to hold back. 

(Your moon is fixed in Cancer.)

You give, give, give—and, in equal, if not a little more, measure: take, take, take. 

Want, want, want.

You think of his heat searing your back, liquifying your spine, turning your calcified bones to polymer, and know, deep down within your aching marrow, that what you crave is blue. 

You can't let yourself want this—want him. 

It's dangerous. Wrong. It's a gaping maw of hurt and agony just waiting to sink its teeth into your fleshy body, to tear you apart; ripping you limb from limb until you're a pulpy mess of tendon and crushed bones, barely human, but alive. Stuck in anguish. 

He's heartbreak in smoke, in Maduro brown with a golden logo on the stem. 

—means dark. Ripe. Used to only be made from the highest leaves, 'cause they spend the most time on the plant. 

Dark. Ripe. Price. 

Dangerous. Addictive. Inescapable. 

His eyes—l'heure bleue—gaze at you through the dense fog. Waiting. Waiting. It's in your hands, now. The option to march forward and commence, to push yourself into his palm, in the worn hands that touched brushed the small of your back one day, and ignited a fire in your veins. 

Or to retreat. 

To walk back, to end this. To call it. Mentor, mentee. Captain. Disciple. Distance will split between you, stifling like the air that clogs the tiled, tacky room. Heavy, oppressive, and—

Inescapable. 

Fuck. 

You either take, take, and then deal with the aftermath of a bloody battle that will leave false starts on your bones, cutting deep to bleed marrow into your bloodstream, or you—

Forfeit. 

There is no future in this. No grand declaration of romance or togetherness. It's the artificial merging of bodies in an offering to Hēdonē; an evanescent dance. It leaks heartache in the seams, and carries the tang of disillusionment should you dip your fingers in glacial blue. It'll stain you. His fingertips are drenched in agony—molten red, a hot poker—and will brand your flesh, scar your body with the perfect imprint of his touch. Of him. 

It'll rear, in those soft, lonely moments when your thoughts are too loud and the room is too quiet, and the phantom press of his skin will become a burden. 

Yearning. 

You hate how it tastes oh so familiar. 

Perpetual. Never-ending. Stasis.

You look at him and see blue: blue eyes, blue blood, blue heart, blues. 

(Ache.)

But if you don't: 

Stagnancy. 

(Is it so different from stasis, really?)

It's nautical twilight somewhere, surely. The centre of the sun is six degrees below the horizon. You have six more degrees to go before it ends. 

Six. 

And then—

(It's not a jump, but a leap.)

Your fingers dig into the skin of your forearm. Piercing. Painful. The bite leaves crescents behind. Blue moons. You pry them apart, and—

Drop. 

Into the sea. Into blue. 

He says your name when you bare yourself to him again, consenting to this—whatever it is—and giving yourself over like an offering to some whimsical god of lust and poor choices. 

The rasp of it makes your spine prickle—a low simmering heat sparks in your belly: satiated by your own fingers but never satisfied. Him standing before you, eager and wanting, strokes the flames until they burn in a frenzy of wildfire; consuming everything in its wake until you're raw, charred husk on the verge of collapsing. 

A fragile supernova. 

Your core is molten; liquid heat—absolute hot—and when he moves, you feel the foundations wobble, and start to fall apart at the seams. 

(Somehow, you know his hands are the only things capable of keeping you whole.)

Price, still dressed in his sweatpants—tented with the obvious outline of his turgid arousal—and tight t-shirt crosses the threshold in seven easy steps. The soft squelch of his feet against wet tile echo in the room, somehow louder than your gasping breaths. 

He doesn't walk to you, he stalks. His gait is measured, purposeful; each step brings him inches closer to your trembling, bare form, and the heaviness of his lidded gaze, liquid blue in a chamber of pearlescent white, cudgels into your ribcage, breaking your resolve apart as it pries the protective ivory wrapped around your delicate, fragile heart apart. 

"Price—"

The grey of his pants is splattered with the inkblot stain of the water sprinkling from the looming showerhead. The darkening patches draw your eye to the jut of his hips, wide and expansive, and then further down to the damp outline of his thick, heavy cock still housed in a cotton polymer. 

There's a fever in your veins—a sickness echoed in the folds of ever blue that pierce through the smog clouding around you. A blunt weight, a burning heat. 

His shirt moulds to the contours of his chest when he finally, finally, stands in front of you. The burnt umber of his chest hair bled through the logo of his faded, worn tee. Liverpool Football Club in bright red against stark white. It glues to his pecs, his biceps.

Your mouth waters at the sight. 

"You want this?" 

His hands lift, biceps bulging, flexing under the tight cotton when he presses them against the slick, humid tile. His hair clings to his forehead, dark and wet. Droplets bead in his beard. 

He presses forward, eyes brimming with want; a palpable sense of desperation that shouldn't frisson over his rigid lines. 

Price won't repeat his words—not when his voice is thicker than tar, and stripped bare—and you arch against the cool porcelain pressing into your back, the duality of his unrelenting heat, and the chill of ceramic making every synapse in your head misfire. 

Trembling, shaking, and desperately trying to hold on to some sense of cognisance amid this turbulent reality, you force a nod. A jerk of your chin.

He breathes through his nose, the breath wisping over the bridge of your nose. Frustration, you think, and—

Impatience. Uncertainty. 

"Do you—"

Your facsimile of consent isn't enough for him. He's not a man known to repeat himself, and this—the words that are ripped from the smouldering depths of his chest should be a warning, if not a bare-faced testament to just how much he wants this—makes your heart flutter. A thrumming beat that seems to echo in the scant space between your bodies, the crevasse pitched at an intentional distance by his stalwart sense of control, propriety. 

He won't touch you unless he's absolutely sure you want this, him—

Frustrating. 

Verbalising your assent, your eagerness, makes something churn inside of you. As if uttering the words aloud will somehow break the spell you cast over him by your pithy voice ringing his name in the shades of your pleasure, the sight of your delicate fingers threading between your swollen, drenched folds. 

You want him—haven't wanted anything nearly as much in your life than to feel his damp, naked chest flush against yours, his hips prying your thighs apart, his massive hands grasping your flesh like each pound was owed to him, and he was collecting his dues. 

But—

That leap, the precipice you balance yourself on, is daunting. A touch won't be enough. A taste would just be a tease. A morsel. 

You don't want a crumb—you want it all. 

"Price," you whine instead, biting back the words he wants to hear. "Just—give it to me—"

It makes him groan. His head tips forward, eyes burning pits of sapphire-stained coal. 

"Need to hear you say it."

It borders that illicit equinox of being both too much and not enough: that dangerous precipice where you either climb to higher, deadlier altitudes or fall down to certain death. 

You wonder if there is a win somewhere in that. A choice when you come out unscathed, whole. 

Price leans in, hair wet, matted to his forehead, beard slick with droplets of water that bead against the auburn, and immediately you think: no. 

There is no victory in this. 

And yet—

"Fuck me, captain—"

—you just can't help yourself sometimes. 

. . .

His hands are firebrands, fingers the lit end of a cigar. When he touches your skin, you hear the sizzle of your flesh burning away, and the pop of it cauterising under his blistering heat. He seals a little part of himself in the wounds he wrought: buries them deep in your dermis until they leak into your bloodstream. 

It's wicked. Intense. 

The clothes he wore were shed from his body like a second skin under your quiet, hungry acquiescence. They sit in a sopping pile that keeps drawing your eye.

He's naked—just like you—but there is something marginally more intimate, vulnerable, in seeing your stolid leader in such a state of disarray. His hair is clumped from the humidity and moisture—matted on the top, but moussed on his side when he stepped away from you, and peeled the drenched shirt from his body. It sticks up in pieces near his ears, and your fingers ache with a longing to smooth them down. 

Make him presentable, somehow. 

Or maybe it's a distraction. A way to skirt around the tangibility of him standing before you, touchable and real, and—

And wanting. 

The same shades of your desire are echoed in the rucked crevasses of cenote blue when he gazes down at you, head bowed, and catching the spray like your own personal protector. The water hits the nape of his neck, and glides down his broad shoulders, his chest. 

You want to sink your teeth into the puddles caught by the jut of his clavicles. Want to taste the briny water running in rivulets across his skin. 

Want, you think, and want, want, want—

Price's hand knots in the fine hair at curve of your neck, a perfect fistful in the thick of his palm, and he uses it as an anchoring point, a steer, to bend your chin in whichever way suits him best to slant his rapacious mouth over yours, and devour. 

His kisses are blistering—contained: controlled, powerful, and measured; and desperate: soft gasps, gentle hums, and needy noises spill from the parted seam of his teeth, muffled by his nicotine-soaked tongue that dips in each crevasse it can find. 

It's addicting—just like you knew he would be. 

His touch is better than anything your nimble fingers could ever conceive; broad strokes of his rough hands run down the inches of skin available to him. Calloused thumbs catch the mooned curve of your nipple, grazing the soft tissue until your mouth drops in a gasp of his name. He rolls the blunt pad of his finger over them until they tingle from his touch, until each brush sends a shock of pleasure to your core. 

Price's hand slides down, fingers ghosting over the wet skin of your side, your hip, your thigh. Each whisper of a touch drags out a whimper from your throat. It's too much. Your skin prickles with goosebumps in his wake, and leaves you feeling feverish and chilled at the same time. A war, then, starts as your body tries to oscillate between stemming the ache inside of you, the emptiness in your cunt, and the delicious drag of his flesh over yours. A droplet of intimacy and tenderness in a sea that collects the ashes of Gomorrah when it rains. 

It is a shade softer than what you've come to expect from your captain, and far more delicate than you deserve. 

The unexpected tenderness of this moment is a stab to your chest. Blunt, brutal—it's a sharp juxtaposition to the ginger way he touches you; the soft reverence in his gaze when he looks down at you. 

Just sex, you think. Lust, want. Greed, hunger. 

It isn't supposed to mean anything outside of unexpected happenstance; the melding of two willing bodies in a sign of ritualistic devotion to Hēdonē. 

And yet—

You want. Full stop. 

Everything. All of what he has to offer, and more, because you're never satisfied with just one. Never content until you've consumed, devoured, everything. Every iota of whatever it is that ensnared your attention. 

And it's terrifying. 

It's not a jump, but a leap. A careening descent down an embankment that has no ledges for you to sink your fingers in, and cling to. It's a treacherous fall to the bottom. 

And still. Still. You won't regret the plunge. The drop. 

How can you when you know what his skin feels like under your palm—warmer, softer, than you could have ever imagined. What he smells like when he leans in close, head dropping to suckle on your pulse point—vetiver and smoke; thick and musky—and the scent of his damp hair, cigar and malt, that darkens when it's wet, and curls slightly at the ends. 

He's hairier than you'd imagined he would be—a thick bed of black curls on his chest that taper off into a line down his stomach, his navel, before thickening around his pelvis. A bed of curls, untrimmed and wry, that frame the jut of his thick, uncut cock. It curves a little to the left, and what he lacks in length—though you'd hardly call nearly six inches lacking—he makes up for in sheer girth. He's fatter than anything you'd ever felt in the palm of your hand, than you'd ever taken before. Your mouth waters at the sight, and you wonder if his cock would taste the same as the skin of his neck, his red nipples that peak through the coarse curls. 

Wonder, then, if you'd even be able to take him all the way down to the base or if he'd stuff you full, and make your jaws ache just around the head of his fat cock. 

When you gasp it out—wanna choke on your cock—Price shudders. The hitch in his breath, humid on your neck where he buried his face, nipping the skin around your jugular, is punched out of his chest, and accompanies a low snarling noise that sounds more animalistic than it does human. 

"Fuckin' hell, love," he heaves through clenched teeth. His gaze flickers up, staring at you through the dusting of brown lashes cut over blue ashlar. His mouth is red from the trail of peppered bites, nips, he laved against your wet sternum. It's sin, you think, when he shivers. When his nostrils flare. "You can't just say shite like that—"

"Played with your pretty little cunt earlier, thinkin' of me, mmhm? Made yourself cum, didn't you?" Price stands to his full height, head bowing over yours. His hand wraps around the thick of his cock, eyes cresting in pleasure at the touch. There is a moment, then, when his gaze flickers to you, catching the burning anticipation that greets him like a kiss. "Gonna fuck you now, yeah?"

The look on his face, the hunger lingering in the cut of cerulean that gleams through the thin mist that clouds around you, is magnetic. Captivating. You can't tear your gaze away from the almost primal way he stares down at you. Wanting. Needy. 

You taste heme in the back of your throat, and feel something knot inside your chest—something animalistic, possessive—when his eyes drop like an anchor to the smooth curve of your throat when you swallow the ichor down. 

There's is the faintest flash of teeth from beneath his wet beard. A gnarled grimace. A botched grin. He bares the whites of his canines and moves closer to you. The blunt press of his throbbing cock steals the last vestiges of air from your quivering lungs. 

"Teasin' me, eh?" He rasps, eyes dropping further to catch the sight of him dragging the silky head over your wet flesh until it's notched at the apex of your sex, kissing the divot above your aching clit. 

With your lungs collapsing, you can't find the words to refute him, and settle instead for a meek nod. 

"Use your words, love." It's a snarl punched through the clench of his teeth. "I want to hear you, yeah?"

"Yes," you gasp, back arching, aching for him. "Yes, captain—"

His broad shoulders tremble, lashes fluttering when the head of cock meets your cunt. The slide of him, iron-hard and velvet soft, has you mewling out some broken whisper of his name. Price responds with a groan. A wet, rasping noise spills out from his heaving chest. 

"Fuck—," the curse is sawed out from between clenched teeth, the brush of his cock parting your slick folds, pressing taut to your leaking hole, has something wanting and possessive simmering in those cerulean pools. A gnarled hunger. 

It makes you wonder, then, how often he'd leaned back against the same tile, his hand wrapped around himself just like this, and whispered your name into the steam. 

"Look so pretty like this," he rumbles, fingers leaving indents in the thick of your thigh when he grasps you tighter. "All desperate for my fuckin' cock. Want it, don't you?"

The whimpered yes is ripped from your throat and shredded between the small gap of your jaws before his words take any tangible shape in your mind. 

Your captain asks you a question—want my cock, don't you? So fuckin' desperate for it, ain't you?—and you respond immediately. No questions asked. 

Pavlov's dog, you think, mouth watering when his cock slips against your cunt. 

Price stops with just the head of his cock kissing your entrance, movements halting abruptly. 

The protesting whine is cut off when he leans down, lips slanting over yours in a soft kiss, a brush. His beard scraps over the sensitive skin of your cheeks and chin, but the wet drag of his coarse hair feels good. 

"Price—"

"Are you ready for me?"

No. It's immediate. Quick and decisive. A firm, assured thing that echoes in the scant spaces of your ribs. 

You should say no. No, because then you'll want more. No, because once will not be enough to satiate the hunger inside of your chest. The growing chasm that growls out its need with each soft utterance of your name, each touch of his hand. 

You're greedy. 

You don't, though. 

The hunger is stifled under the waves of desire that roll through you when his cock notches against your clit. 

Instead, you nod. Whispering, I want it. 

His gaze is blistering when he levels it on you. Gyre blue; arsenic white. His mouth knots into an even line, thick with anticipation. Determination. He echoes your nod once, and then presses his forehead against yours, holding it there. 

His eyes bore into you when he steadies his hand on your thigh, trapped in his firm hold, and pushes himself against you once more. 

"Breathe for me," he rasps, the word a low command, and then he rocks forward. 

His cock stretches you with each inch that slides into your cunt. It's a white-hot heat that licks up your spine—the edges of too much and not enough, and how could there possibly be another inch when he's already so fucking deep?

The doesn't stop until his hips are flesh with yours, filling you to the brim. When his cock presses against the plug of your womb, you expect him to stop. He's bottomed out, filling you so deeply that you can almost taste his bitter tang on your tongue, but he doesn't. He doesn't.

His cock notches into your womb: a pulsing grind into the very end of you. The slide of it makes you hiss, makes your nails rake over his flesh, leaving rivers of red when you claw at him, struggling to keep yourself from being swallowed by the waves of pleasure, pain, that roll over you. 

He pauses his slow rolls for a moment, just long enough to catch your lips in a searing kiss, and lift his hand up, pressing his palm flat against the wet tile. Distracting you, maybe, from the drag of his cock pulling out of your pulsing, gripping him tight as if to keep him locked inside of you forever. With his mouth on yours, fingers threading through the wet, clumped locks of his hair, you barely have time to brace yourself when he plants his feet on the floor, and rocks into you. 

The air is forced from your lungs with the even cant of his hips, the slide of his cock back into you. It burrows deep, hitting something behind your naval that makes you keen, head reeling from the phosphenes that blink, coruscating in front of your eyes. An illicit lure in bioluminescence.

The blunt, bludgeoning thrust rattles through you, hard enough to make your bones tremble, and your head spin—dizzy and heavy with the blow of his hips fucking into the tight clench of you around him. 

His hand drops from the wall, falling to your thigh.

He doesn't give you a moment to ready yourself before slips his fingers around your flesh, and hefts you up. Your back slides against the slick wall, thighs pushed tight around his marrow waist, held tight in the grip of his hands. 

"C–captain—!"

Price shushes you with a searing kiss full of teeth, tongue. It tastes of charcoal and Sycamore bark when his tongue rolls over yours; a heady, smoky tang that makes you dizzy off the pure nicotine nestled between his teeth. 

Comfortably situated in his grasp, legs wrapped around his waist, he starts a new rhythm. The stretch of his cock sawing into your pussy stings, edging sharply against your mettle as he fills you deeper, wrenching you open wider, than you'd ever experienced before. 

But it's a good pain. 

The kind you don't think you could ever live without now that you had a taste. No substitute for the real thing. 

It's a scorching heat that ebbs, notching higher and higher as Price holds you tighter against the slick wall, fucking into you like a man starved. 

His pace is hard, fast. Unrelenting. 

Pleasure blooms inside of you and feels like a bruise when it brims in your nerves. Sparks of pain, ones that edge into that dangerous precipice of feeling somehow good despite the ache, weave together with the bliss. A quit of too much knotted into an overwhelming sense of euphoria. 

Maybe it's the taste of success, of victory, when Price drops his head to your temple, mouthing across your damp skin. His tongue is scorching when it laves over your flesh, chasing the droplets that leak from your hairline to your cheekbone. 

The graze of his beard running over your skin feels like everything you wanted, and more.

Your fingers curl over his broad shoulders, holding him close to your trembling chest. He's an anchor, a beacon—a buoy in the middle of the ocean. You can't help yourself from thinking six degrees when his chin lifts, and his mouth swallows the gospel of his name as it's choked out between your bruised lips. 

The noises he makes, deep, rasping growls of your name; grunts of pleasure; hisses when you clench tight around the thick of him, desperate to keep him locked inside of you, are better than any fantasy you could have conjured up. The weight of his body on yours, the tight grasp of his hands, the rasp of his tongue, the whisper of your name—it piles and piles; the heavy weight falling on you like an anvil. 

Velvet softness, and heat. Each drag of him over your sensitive walls makes you keen, toes curling, back arching in pleasure.

You're already sensitive from earlier, from when you played with yourself thinking of him, and the fullness, the slight sting of taking him into you, make a knot form behind your navel. A spooling thread of bliss pulling taut with each deep plunge of him seating deep behind your belly button. 

"Touch yourself," he demands, words rucked through the clench of his teeth, bared in pleasure as he syphons bliss from your willing body. "C'mon, love—want you cum around my cock. Wanna feel you—"

You had expected blunt brutality—it had circled your fantasies the moment you pressed your back against the tile, and slipped your fingers through your folds. It's a staple of him, you think; who he is. Ferocity in flesh and bone. He'd touch you with the same rough hands, and regard you with rougher words. 

"Mm, spread your legs for me, dove."  

"You want it bad, don't you?"  

Words reeking of the same smoke on his breath. Heavy commands fell from his blistering lips. It brought you to the brink, to the ledge of that white-hot pleasure until the thought of his hands branding your skin shoved you over. 

Hearing it uttered aloud now nearly has you weeping. Frenzied with desire, and that unignorable sense of victory when he leans down, hands roughly hiking your thighs higher up his waist as he fucks into the molten centre of you. Accomplishment when your skin smarts long after his hand drifts away, knowing there will be a mark left behind—blood pooling under your bruised flesh when he gripped too hard. 

It's enough to make you delirious. 

"Come on," he husks, pressing the flat of his teeth against the underside of your jaw. "You made your pretty cunt cum on those fingers earlier, mmh? Do it again. Make yourself cum around my cock. You wanted this, didn't you? Moaned my fuckin' name with your fingers buried inside your sweet pussy. Well, now you have it, love. So, fuckin' cum—"

His words make you moan loud, your belly quivering at the heat in his voice when hisses the command into your skin. 

Your hand slips from the vice grip around his shoulders, dropping to the apex of your spread thigh. Your cunt is burning to the touch, and hotter than the steam billowing around you like a thick cloud. Condensed sin. The lips of your pussy are slick, and swollen from the brutal way he fucks into you. The tips of your fingers ghost over the chafed, raw skin of your pussy, feeling the thick slide of his wet cock, sticky and drenched in the mess of your arousal, as it pounds into you. 

Everything feels somehow heightened, real, when you feel the stretch of your flesh around the molten heat of him. 

It makes you moan—a noise you'd never heard yourself make before: low, needy. A desperate whine, broken at the first vowel of his name. Jo—John—!

"That's it, love," he gasps, low and desperate, lashes tickling the skin of your jaw. "Cum for me—uhhh, fuck—gonna—gonna fuckin' cum—"

Your fingers pass over your throbbing clit, circling in tandem with each blunt piston of his cock kissing the seal of your womb. Oversensitive from your earliest orgasm, it doesn't take much for you to march toward that precipice once more, dusting over your nerves where it stings like a bruise, and rips through you like a gale. 

The building crescendo of your pleasure ends when Price snaps his hips against yours, hitting deep, and finding a spot inside of you that seems to be a direct link to Nirvana, to bliss. He throws you over the ledge until you're once again falling down with nothing but him (him, him, always him) on your mind, and his name slipping off your tongue. 

"C–captain—!"

Your cunt throbs around him, fluttering like the rapid pulse beating against the thin skin he nips with his teeth. It floods your veins with liquid bliss, and the euphoric haze that congeals in your head, a mushy slurry of chemicals and victory, is soporific, heavy. It falls on you like an anvil, an anchor around your neck, and you cling to him, murmuring his name into his crown as his thrusts grow sloppy, clumsy. 

Price lifts his head, hands holding you tight to him as he fucks the tight clench of your cunt. His lips slant against yours in a messy, wet kiss, broken by gasps of your name spilling from his mouth. His tongue lashes across your teeth, rhythm stuttering into a desperate series of thrusts. 

He groans in your ear, a hushed noise cudgelled in the background of everything else—the slap of his balls slapping against your sopping cunt as he plunges into you, pushing in as deep as he can go, and then deeper still, the heavy pants that tumble from your lips. 

"Yeah, fuck, love—," another brutal snap has your mind whiting out in pleasure. "Jus' like that. Takin' it so good. So fuckin' good, ain't you?" 

He batters against the seal of your womb like he was trying to bludgeon his way inside. 

"Fuck—gonna cum—gonna—"

You spasm around him, tied tight at the base of his cock like a pretty little knot, a bow, and he groans low and dazed when he pulses deep inside of you, filling you up with his cum. 

"Fuck—!"

He snarls your name, mouth sliding across your skin; wet and messy. His hands are hot on your skin, heavy and branding as he clings to you, riding out the last smouldering vestiges of his release that paints insides pearlescent with the stain of him. 

Branded, you think, inside and out. 

Your lips sting when he rubs the coarse hair of his chin over them, mouth trailing sloppy, open-mouthed kisses up the bridge of your nose. 

He comes to himself in increments, and you catalogue each notch as they unfold before you. Heaving gasps against your neck; messy, wet kisses; murmurs of devotion into your hairline, your temple (fuck, love, fuck, feels so good, so good, good for me, perfect little thing, aren't you? So fuckin' perfect, can't get enough of your little cunt around me, gonna taste you after, gonna bury my face between these pretty thighs and make you ride my face, kitten, gonna make you cum on my tongue—); and finally, finally—his head lifts. 

The sight of him, cheeks stained roseate from the heat of the still running shower, from the exertion of spreading you open, and fucking you against the wall—

It's breathtaking. 

His eyes are dark, cindered ash and crushed basalt around the edge of a liquid blue cenote. A lunar mare—Oceanus Procellarum dusted with fine azure. 

Thunderclouds of blue. 

Something intense brims in the arsenic gyre when he stares down at you, lidded eyes heavy with the weight of his lingering pleasure; subdued and far more docile than you'd ever imagined he was capable of. 

He blinks slowly and languidly; liquid strokes of a pale curtain suffering over the glacial canyons cut into ashlar—the motion is almost hypnotic when the thinning fog from the cooling shower sweeps across the scant space between your bodies. A veil of diaphanous white. 

The haze makes him seem almost ethereal. Incorporeal. It almost feels like a dream—a manifestation of your wants taking shape in your subconsciousness. An illicit tease from the depths of your endless desire. 

But the thud of his heart under your palm, the feeling of his cooling flesh glued to your skin like gauze, and harsh breaths ghosting across your flesh are too good to ever be a dream. 

You're not imaginative enough to conjure the phantom feeling of his softening cock seated deep within your aching, tender cunt. 

Or the sting of your flesh. 

Your body feels like one massive contusion. The throbbing sting of strummed rubber bands snapping across the places he touched, gripped tight between his fingers. 

It feels like the aftermath of a battle, and the comparison makes your mouth split, unfurling into a satisfied grin as the quiver in your muscles begins to remind you of that time you sprinted through the bustling streets of Cairo together. The heat blooming in your chest, your core, as hot as the sun that scorched your exposed skin. 

The burn in your thighs is the same throbbing pain you felt when you slid on loose sand, and skinned your bare knees on the cobblestone of a hidden alleyway, tucked behind an alcove. 

Price is a firm mountain holding you steady—just like then, when he picked you up off the ground despite your protests (just a scratch, cap, I can walk—), and carried you through the maze of winding tunnels on the outskirts of the city centre. Solid. Stalwart. Your dependable leader. 

You've looked at him the same way for the last four years. Respect, want. Admiration, desire. Greed. You crave him in ways that always, always, felt unattainable. One-sided. 

Silly. 

And that was it, you think, staring into the naked blue of his eyes. Bare. Raw. Vulnerable. 

You've been so busy running from your own feelings, your own ways, convinced without any proof that they were one-sided. A one-way path without any parallels, any concurrents. All this time, with your head buried in your chest to avoid getting caught staring at him so wantingly, you've missed the look in his eye, bent by refraction—your own avoidance. 

The way Price looks at you is rapacious—a twin flame to your own covetous desires. 

There's something so unfathomably fragile about how he stares at you, now. Head bowed, catching the brunt of the chilled spray as it rains down on him, shielding you from the cold. He keeps you warm, and tucked safely in the fold of his arms. Unwilling, you think, to let go just yet. To slip back into the same impasse as before. The same forced stalemate forged by hesitation. 

It drags something out of your chest—a laugh, maybe: broken and frayed at the edges, a vocal fry of derision, and disbelief. 

His chin lifts at the sound, brow furrowing together in a knot of confusion between his nautical blue eyes. Six degrees. You feel every notch when he slowly lowers the two of you to the ground, falling in a clumsy heap to his knees, and still buried within you. 

"What?" 

The word is drenched in the thick tang of the bloom of his dormant hesitation shucking the tendrils of sleep away as the spell around you splinters at the broken laughter that tumbled from your lips. It makes you coo—a soft, soothing noise to placate the dent between his brow, and the knot of his mouth souring into an even line. 

"Just thinking," you hum, legs tightening around his waist, knees now hiked up the sides of his ribcage. 

He hisses teeth gritted teeth when you wriggle on his lap. "About what?"

Your palm sides down his slick chest until the thud of his heart sits in the cup of your hand. "About this."

Your words draw a low hum from his throat, and you feel it reverberate through your joints. "That so?"

That cold night in Cairo rears again. No substitute for the real thing. 

The thing is: with your head buried in the proverbial sand, you missed the way his eyes never wavered from your face when he said it. How the corners tightened with something that felt like irritation, but now feels like restraint. 

Why you had to hunt for Cleopatra's, anyway. 

(—losin' some bloody cigars' is hardly the same as losin' you, love. Don't you ever do that to me—to us—again—)

In some ways, you think you lost the battle—many of them, in fact—but when he winds his arms around your waist, keeping locked in his embrace, you know you somehow won the war. The unwinnable victory thudding steadily against the palm of your hand. 

You glue your forehead to his, and murmur: "been waiting a long time for this." 

"Well," he rasps, voice ghosting over the shell of your ear. "Hell of a way to get my attention."