"Hey there, beautiful. Sorry I'm late."
"There you are." Meirah sat back on her heels in the corner she used for meditation and nudged up the volume on her headset. Carth was posted on a capital ship over Ralltiir at a conclave of Republic military brass. She was holding down the fort on Coruscant, awake despite an early morning appointment with the Jedi council in a few hours. "How are things? Has Admiral Cede succeeded in boring everyone to death with his infrastructure improvement plans yet?"
"Those are interesting enough. I think you'd actually get a charge out of some of the planning going into a couple of the renovated fleet stations. It's the back-and-forth over every bolt and conduit, and the posturing driving that that wears thin after a while."
"Never thought I'd say this, but even so, I wish I was there."
"And if you were here, what would we be doing?"
"Well, first, where is 'here, ' precisely?"
"Out in the commons. Just escaped the wardroom."
"In that case, I suppose I'd have to wait until we were out of public view before I kicked your feet out from under you. If I remember right, Capital ship commons are low on horizontal surfaces that are good for that kind of thing."
There was silence on the line while the mental image struck him."Uh, hold that thought, beautiful. It's a bit of a hike between here and my quarters."
She rolled her shoulders back and emitted a self-satisfied purr, imagining his cheeks flushing to match the scarlet trim on his dress blacks. "Better double-time it, then, while you can still walk." His pulse would be picking up now. She thought of tracing the line of his throat from jaw to collarbone with her fingers, and feeling the rush of blood beneath them.
"I said, hold it!" She recognized that frustrated edge in his voice. It had taken five months and a mad, galaxy-spanning dash to save the Republic for her to realize that she was hearing thwarted attraction, not hostility.
"Ooh. Getting to you a bit, am I?" She chuckled, low in her throat, and swore she could hear him swallow hard at the sound. "And what, exactly, would you like me to be holding right now?" In her minds eye, she slipped her fingers under his waistband, found the groove that started in front of his hipbone, and followed it with her thumb.
His only response was a muffled curse. Feeling the mass of muscle contract under her imagined hand made her want to add an oath of her own.
"Watch the wall, me hearties, while the good Captain goes by. Unless you want to see for yourself whether everything they say about Telosian men is true." She bit her lip, picturing how, but now, his stride would be impeded by trousers that had grown two sizes too short in the rise, and how he'd be ruining the line of his immaculately-tailored coat. Whoever designed Republic Naval mess dress deserved a medal.
"Force, woman, if you don't shut your mouth-" he hissed from between gritted teeth
"You'll what? Inform the Jedi Council of what I'm doing to you? In detail? Oh, now there's a thought to keep a girl warm in your absence." She trailed off with a half-voiced sigh, and heard him choke back a moan in response. "I would pay good money to attend that, ahem, debriefing. Besides. It's not as if I'm torturing a civilian here. Rules of engagement, flyboy."
She heard a loud buzz, followed by a metallic clank. "Service elevator? Good choice if you're feeling a little...conspicuous for the public lift. Can't say it wouldn't have been entertaining to listen as you try to carry on a coherent conversation with your coworkers, though. Hey, I bet the ensign watching the security feeds is bored. Shall we give him a show?"
She either heard or felt his whole frame tense. If she'd been there, she would be pressing his back to the corner of the lift. "Meirah," he gasped, "Please. Almost there."
"As you wish. Take a few seconds to catch your breath. You'll need it."
He exited the service lift. She left him alone with his thoughts, panting and swearing under his breath as he fumbled with the keycard for the door to his room. Finally, she heard the door open, then shut, and a drawn-out noise from him that was somewhere between a sigh and a groan.
"Now. Boots off, then to bed with you. And no touching until I give the word."
"Dammit, Mei-" His coat swiped against the headset as he shrugged out of it. At home, this would be her cue to duck under his chin, breathe in the smell of him, and to judiciously apply lips, tongue, and teeth to the tender flesh under his jaw until he couldn't see straight.
"Enjoying yourself?" There was the low, rough growl that he only used with her.
"Now that you're using that voice? Immensely." she heard his breath catch midway through struggling out of his shirt and made a tsking noise "You know, for a soldier, you're remarkably bad at accepting orders sometimes. Not until I give the word."
"I don't recall you being in my direct chain of command."
"Chain, you say? That's something we haven't tried before. Someplace to escalate if you prove unable to control yourself." Imperiousness camoflauged frustration. She drove her nails into her palms.
"Woman, when I get my hands on you next, we'll see if I control myself," he snarled.
"Looking forward to it. Trousers off, then." She heard the rasp of the fasteners, and a relieved sigh as he pulled himself free. There were no words in the long list of languages she knew for how badly she wanted to be the one working those clasps apart, arms around him from behind, pinioning his elbows to his sides. Watching that tightly-muscled back ripple and arch and feeling him squirm against her in his impatience gave her a visceral thrill that even lightsaber duels struggled to match.
The rustle of bed clothes and the creak of a mattress preceded a hissing noise from him.
"Not until I give the word. Continue to defy me and we can experiment with the limits of my telekinetic talents." She wasn't sure whether the buzz of power she felt was more from the thought that she could possibly reach halfway to the Outer Rim to pin one man's hands over his head or the thought that, when she said it, hebelieved she could. She waited a for a pair of heartbeats, gratified to notice that he was holding his breath.
"Now."
She imagined his hands taking the same path that hers would; palms firm over the flat of his belly, which would be quaking a bit now under his touch. Then a slow, feather-light graze with the fingertips from root to head- there was the hitch in his breath, the growled curse. Finally, a low moan that made her shiver as he took hold of himself.
The bedclothes hissed against his headset as he rolled his head back. A craving to fasten her mouth on his exposed throat, to taste musk and saline and revel in his total vulnerability, hit her like a physical blow.
"Been missing me?"
The laugh that came out of him was like honey over sandpaper. "Oh, believe me, Officers' Mess gets a lot more entertaining when you spend it thinking about alternate uses for the furniture."
"Do tell."
"The table's a couple of centimeters too high to bend you over, but we could improvise a fix. It's supposed to have been reclaimed from a Massassi war chief's effects in the Great Sith conflict. Bet it misses having pretty, Force-lit women splayed over top of it almost as much as I do."
She swallowed a moan at the ensuing rush of imagined sensation, caught between the bite of chilled stone and the heat of his body, both equally unyielding. "Oh, really. What else?"
"Big, sturdy, high-backed conference chairs. Just enough extra width to either side to pull you into my lap. I'd let you ease down over me, grab your hips in both hands, and push into you until I have you writhing and crying out. See how many different species of officers we could offend at a go with that wonderful, filthy mouth of yours."
It may have been a hallucination, but she swore she could feel his breath on her throat, the bristles on his chin rasping against her collarbone. She obliged him with a caustic stream of invective in a dead Zeltrani dialect.
He didn't need familiarity with the language to zero in on every hitch and stutter. "Now who's getting to whom?" he punctuated the question with another throaty laugh that threatened to undo her completely.
"Just distracted, admiring my handiwork." He was breathing in short, ragged gasps now. Gooseflesh would be raising along his neck and shoulders. A few more seconds, and his entire frame would be shivering, subtly at first, then with increasing violence. "You hold up remarkably well under duress, soldier. Good thing, too, because as much as you may think you're almost done here, I'm not through with you."
He responded with an inarticulate growl of protest.
She flexed one hand, imagining the damp hair at his nape tangled around her now-trembling fingers. He spat an elaborate Telosian curse. She curled her hand into a fist. His snarl changed to a whimper. She was definitely not hallucinating.
"Woman, you're killing me," there was an element of real anxiety buried in that hoarse-voiced reproach. A part of her personality that she usually kept on a very short leash seized upon that and ran with it.
"I wonder how long I could hold you here, on the edge, before you fall completely apart."
"Meirah, please. Let me-" she could hear that all-over shudder creeping into his voice.
His heart hammered in her ears. His blood hissed and sang through her. She felt a charge building in the air around her, like the prelude to a sudden storm.
"Meirah!"
"Now."
The cry that tore out of him as he emptied himself made her gasp and arch her back in sympathy. She curled on her side and listened in silence as his body stilled and breathing quieted and slowed, soaking everything in as if she could store the experience, and the energy derived from it, to call on at a later time of need.
"In seventy-six hours I'll be back to Coruscant." He murmured in her ear, voice low and thick with sleepiness and satiety. "And once I'm home? I'm going to put you to the wall and wreck you." Before she could respond, she felt him seize her by the elbows, drive her back against the entryway paneling hard enough to knock the breath out of her lungs, and fasten his mouth on hers with bruising force.
"I'll leave you to mull that one over for a while. Goodnight, beautiful. I love you." He closed the call.
Bloody hells, Onasi, when did you learn to push back Force visions at will? She stared at the ceiling, wide-eyed. It was going to be a long three days.