093 Gentle

Strong, forceful, brute force, killers. All words that people would use to describe a Spartan. Gentle was a word that was never associated with them. They'd been trained to kill aliens and take out insurrectionist, and none of that required a gentle touch. Kat had a skilled touch when it came to tech, but it wasn't what most would consider gentle, forcing her way into systems and reconfiguring devices.

Gentle was a hard concept for any Spartan to understand. Since the glassing of their planets and their training all the gentle had been worked out of them. Instructors had knocked it out of them and the Covenant had glassed it all away.

At first these statements had been true to Carter. At first he had left marks and bruises, though she knew that it was only because he didn't know how not to. She had never really expected that he would, but she had expected him to be a bit gentler with her then he was with a grunt. When she showed the bruises to him, that all changed.

After that he was too gentle with her, like she was made of glass. His touch was feather light no matter where it was. It annoyed her. The touch was usually so light that she couldn't even really feel it. She wanted to feel him, just not end up with bruises from him. It had ended in an argument between them. Carter defending his inability to find an in-between and Kat trying to convince him he could. He hadn't been gentle that time.

He never really got a hang of it. He always was slipping between too rough and too light. Sometimes he would get so close to exactly what she wanted, but the next time he'd be to one of the extremes. She'd tried to show him, be gentle yet forceful at the same time. She never left marks on him but always left him satisfied. That was not to say that Carter didn't leave her happy, just that he could never perfect it.

Even getting close to what she'd wanted was more then she had expected from Carter. She'd seen him easily smash his fist through an elite's skull on the battlefield. The fact that he'd been able to pull it back at all was better then what she had ever hoped for.

Kat's back hit the wall as he pinned her to it. She flinched a bit at the hit. It didn't really hurt, but it was her way of letting him know he was being too rough. His grip loosened on her arms and she pulled him a bit closer. When she did, he stopped loosening his grip. She'd learned how to direct him, lead him to be gentle with her but still forceful enough. Her head moved to the side and his mouth moved to the exposed skin. Her hands moved to the back of his neck, once more pulling him closer or pushing him away to lead him to the amount of force she desired.

Gentle may not be a term that Spartans really understood, but in time, Kat planned to teach Carter the meaning of the word.