CHAPTER 20
Body Language

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For someone lacking in any dating experience, Jason seemed almost unconsciously intent on doing everything he could to woo her right off her feet.

She'd slept later than planned, the result of having stayed up far too late engrossed in a new book that had turned out to be thrilling beyond her expectations. It was after noon by the time she trudged out to the porch with her Depression-era worthy brunch consisting of a can of tomato soup and half a muffin, and flipping hell, she was tired of soup. She wished he would bring her rabbit again, or something else like it, because that had been a delicious – not to mention a refreshing – change.

What she found waiting for her was not rabbit, or even edible for that matter, but upon seeing it she gasped audibly and almost dropped her soup.

For what felt like an entire minute Whitney could only gape, astonished. The entire length of the porch railing, from kitchen door all the way down to the far corner had been completely covered with flowers, until not an inch of the wood beneath was visible. A froth of little white blossoms almost identical to the ones scattered along the lakeside.

Where on earth had he found so many? More importantly, how long had it taken him to do this?

Carefully she set down her food and crossed to the railing for a closer look, noticing immediately that the spray of white had been interspersed with other colors. Bright yellow buttercups, sweet-smelling clover flushed a vibrant fuchsia and still attached to rich green leaves. And then there were the roses. At least, she thought they were roses. Wild ones, not the perfect, manicured kind from a garden with their tightly-packed petals, but softer, flatter, the color fading from a pale peachy-pink to white near the delicate golden centers. Every flower painstakingly and individually placed to create an intricate garland to greet her when she woke.

She was, in a word, spellbound.

The other offerings left by the door were a little more utilitarian: a box of candles, more matches, and a tin of individually-wrapped teabags labeled for easing sleep and soothing colds (likely not his reason for bringing them). But it was the flowers that continued to take her breath away every time she looked at them. Which she did constantly as she ate.

What had been going through his mind as he'd assembled this…this work of art? Had it been the product of what was probably just one in an endless string of sleepless nights? Maybe he'd simply thought she would like it, that it would make her happy.

Mission accomplished.

A little later on, he had caught up to her as she was exiting the bathroom, face washed and teeth freshly brushed, and she hadn't even had time to begin remarking on the gift before he took her hand and started towing her gently from the path and into the woods.

"What—?" she'd begun, only to be shushed into silence when he pressed a finger over the nonexistent mouth-space of his mask.

The reason for the need to be quiet was illuminated a moment or so later when he motioned for her to crouch down next to him and pointed to a spot between the gnarled, exposed knots of a great old tree's roots. Peering through, she saw them: a nest of baby rabbits just starting to hop about like tiny, brown, fuzz-covered popcorn balls. Though she clamped a hand to her mouth to suppress her squeal, she was certain Jason could discern her delight through the other where it groped for the sleeve at his elbow and gripped like a vise.

They had stayed there for a good twenty minutes or so, watching the rambunctious antics of the tiny new rabbits until what must have been their mother returned and began peering around in obvious concern – clearly sensing the nearness of something that didn't belong there – which they took as their cue to go.

And then, when they'd been stepping back out into the camp proper, Jason had paused as though having abruptly remembered something. Reaching into a pocket he extracted a jar stuffed with jagged chunks of something suspended in a viscous, golden substance, which he held out for her to take with an air of pleased presentation. She'd taken it, uncertain at first until she realized what she was looking at.

Honeycomb.

He'd brought her a jar of honeycomb. Fresh from the look of it, and from the slight stickiness at the edge of the lid. She had an indescribable certainty that it hadn't been stolen, either. From anyone but the bees, that was. Brought it because he presumed (correctly) that her succumbing to the siren call of the shitty store-bought chemical cookies, alongside everything else remotely sugary, indicated she had a sweet tooth? Or maybe he just remembered it being tasty and wanted to share in that? Perhaps both.

Again she had gaped, stunned. He must have been on his way to deliver it before the discovery of the rabbit nest had distracted him.

"Thank you," she had murmured, unable – and not really trying – to keep the lilt of pleasure from her voice. "Where the heck did you find this?"

He gave a loose wave of a hand to indicate somewhere to the west of where they were now, which didn't implicitly say had been a fair distance but she surmised it had been.

Her brow had furrowed. "You weren't stung, were you?"

Jason's eyes had creased with a smile as he shook his head as if to say: of course not. She wasn't entirely sure she'd believed him, but she supposed he must have been fine. If gaping wounds didn't trouble him she supposed beestings would be next to nothing.

She had lowered her eyes to the jar cradled between her hands like a treasure, unable to ignore the dizzy, haphazard race of her pulse.

Well. He had definitely upped his game where bringing her gifts was concerned. There were things she needed – sustenance, shelter, light – but she didn't consider those things gifts. He'd seen to her needs before he'd even come close to liking her, and he had continued to do so, though the effort had certainly increased with time. Even his bringing her things to occupy her mind had seemed more kindnesses than gestures of affection, meeting a different necessity a little higher up on the hierarchy. But the knife, the flowers, going out of his way to show her cute baby animals because he knew she would like them, and now presenting her with honey he had gathered himself…it might have been a bit unconventional, but they were not that far off from gestures she had been raised to associate with courting.

If he did any of it with such intent, or with the intent of convincing her not to go tomorrow, she suspected it was only unconsciously so. The acts themselves were purely for their own sake, and hers. Though they might have been just a tiny bit selfish in that he derived pleasure from her pleasure, as was obvious simply by the way he watched her for reactions, studious and eager.

The man had no guile to speak of. It was both incredibly endearing and unexpectedly attractive, which shouldn't have been unexpected at all. Social conditioning would have her believe that lacking in this specific kind of artifice was equal to being somehow undesirable for reasons she could not actually string together in a way that made any kind of evolutionary sense. Why should she want a man that made it clear he could manipulate her should he choose; a man whose motives were unclear, especially where her happiness and wellbeing were concerned? Biologically it didn't make sense. So clearly, somewhere along the line, something had gotten screwed up socially – likely in tune with people becoming more…what was the word? Right. Evolved.

As they stood there at the edge of the path, Jason had lifted a hand to her hair, brushing a fingertip lightly across the flower she had tucked into the twist she'd created behind her ear. One of the roses from the railing, put there in what had seemed like a small, unthinking way of carrying the gift with her, but which she recognized now had been a bit of unconscious courting behavior of her own.

"You like my hair?"

It wasn't really a question, she already knew he did just from the way he had touched it two nights ago, but he nodded as if it had been. Perhaps because he had wanted her to ask, why he'd touched it in the first place. Had he wanted to somehow tell her she looked pretty?

She was probably reading way too much into everything, which was not out of character for her in the slightest, but she felt her face go warm all the same. Because hadn't she kind of hoped he might think it? Hadn't some small part of her subconsciously been trying to get his attention? Putting a flower in her hair wasn't exactly on par with intentionally wearing jewelry he'd given her…but it wasn't that far off, either.

"Thank you," she said again, a little quieter this time, "for the flowers. They're beautiful."

And with no more than that mild expression of thanks she had managed to turn Jason Voorhees – the infamous, vengeful ghost of Crystal Lake and grown-ass undead tank of a man – into the epitome of an awkward adolescent boy. His eyes dropped, his shoulders hunching inward in that tell-tale bashful yet pleased way as he offered a squirming half-shrug that was absolutely supposed to say it was no big deal, but was also quite a loud proclamation of delight at her enjoyment.

At that point he pretty much fled. He didn't run, exactly; he took a few stilted steps back, lifting one great hand in an uncertain little half-wave before turning and all but diving back into the shelter of the woods.

He was such a puppy. He could run a hand up her leg in way that was almost blatantly sexual and be almost entirely calm, but thank him for bringing her flowers and he lost his nerve?

It was goddamn adorable.

As she was, yet again, running out of underwear she spent most of her day doing laundry; hauling it out to the stream in a basket and working the clothes between scrub brush and rock as she had before.

The thing was, she didn't really know why she did it, or why she hadn't simply done enough to get her through the rest of the day instead of two entire trips' worth. It wasn't as if she'd need it. She wasn't planning on packing up and lugging all these clothes that didn't really belong to her. She supposed it was just to have something to do – something that wasn't thinking about how heavily the prospect of tomorrow was starting to weigh on her. She didn't want to think about why that was, or why the concept of finally getting to go home just sat like a cold lump in the pit of her stomach instead of lending her comfort.

So she washed, and she sang – cycling through all the song lyrics she could regurgitate from memory a good third of which seemed to be comprised of nothing else.

She didn't know quite what to do with herself after that. She hung up the last of the clean clothes to dry and wandered up the stairs inside the lodge, but even her exploring was less than enthusiastic. The discovery of the dusty, pristinely untouched bed- and bathrooms – reserved for the camp owners, she guessed – she met with little more energy than it took to note that they were there, at which point she realized she was in rather a gloomy mood. She wouldn't have expected it after such a lovely morning (well, afternoon), but she was. And she didn't much care for it.

Sunsets seemed to pass slowly in the summer. In all likelihood they lasted no longer than in any other season, but it felt as if they did. Part of it was that they seemed to start earlier, as the long shadows of afternoon continued to stretch and deepen and suddenly it was evening yet still too light to be properly night – only to stay that way for hours still after.

It wasn't that way tonight.

As she wandered listlessly back outside it was to see that, to her dismay, the light had faded much more than seemed right, and the hourglass feeling – that of hours slipping through her fingers like sand through a sieve – crept back up on her.

Time was running out, and there was nothing she could do about it.

Her hand smoothed gently back and forth over the porch railing, just brushing the delicate surface of the flowers there, and trying to pretend like she wasn't staring into the line of shadow-choked trees for Jason.

Wherever he was, she didn't know. And there was probably good reason for that. She had spent no more than thirty minutes in his company that day, and as much as that chafed as hurt as she could have let herself feel about his absence all evening when he clearly knew she would be leaving tomorrow, she suppressed the urge to go looking when it was already much too dark. For all she knew the retinue of gifts today had been his way of saying goodbye. For all she knew he was staying away with the intent of easing the sting of her inevitable departure. She didn't blame him. She wished she knew how to ease her own yawning feeling of melancholy.

This was not how she wanted to spend her last night here. She didn't want to end this crazy, awful, and yet somehow wonderful experience on such a bitter note. She wanted…well, she couldn't have everything she wanted. But she could do a right lot better than sulking out on the porch in the dark.

It was by chance that she remembered the wood-box out behind the kitchen door – the wood inside old, but dry, well protected by the water-sealed box. She had been lighting the first of her many evening candles when the flicker of the flame at the end of her match had caught and held her eye, the idea like a night-blooming flower in her mind.

Whitney had only barely been a Girl Scout; just long enough to endure being forced to learn things she had no interest in learning and sing songs and play games with other children that she hadn't especially liked. Enough to experience a single cycle of selling cookies, and declared that she was not cut out for troop-life. But there were a few things from her brief stint as a scout that had been useful enough to remember. One of which being that she knew how to make a mean campfire. Granted, it was a little different in an actual fireplace rather than out in the open – but in a way that made it easier. Less chance of wind blowing it out before it got started, or of losing control and accidentally starting a blaze. She would be able to let it burn itself safely out at the end of the night.

As she shoved her makeshift bedding out of the way and assembled materials – toting wood in from the box to stack on the stone hearth and gathering old newspapers from a stack on one of the bookshelves – her mood gradually began to lift. It wouldn't be exactly what she wanted; but she could have dinner in front of a warm fire, finish her book, and maybe have a cup of tea with some of that honey. It would be lovely and cozy, and since it was shaping up to be something of a chillier night, cozy sounded just about perfect.

Soon enough she had a nice little fire sparking cheerily away in the fireplace, and she was setting the grate into place to see about dinner. Rather than simply settle for soup as was from the can, she used the little gas camp stove to boil some water and cooked herself some pasta from the jar on the counter, drowned it in hot cream of mushroom soup, and pretended it was vegetarian stroganoff. And if the noodles were a little stale, she really couldn't tell.

Carrying her bowl into the rec room, she settled into one of the low wooden chairs and promptly dumped her first forkful of food onto her lap.

With a sigh, she set the bowl on the floor and stood up, shimmying out of her soup-smeared shorts. She didn't bother to replace them. The oversized shirt she'd put on more than covered enough for her own comfort. Besides, there was no one else to see. So she slipped her bra off too, for good measure, shaking it out from the bottom of the shirt and chucking it over the back of the couch to land somewhere on the floor.

Much better.

At some point it had begun to rain. A soft, light summer drizzle almost too faint to hear even when the drops struck the glass of the windows and which only enhanced the cozy cabin atmosphere. Enjoying the hushed patter she ate her dinner, thoroughly enjoying her garbage-gourmet meal so much that she actually went back for seconds. Once finished, she padded back to the kitchen to wash the dishes and heat more water for tea.

To say she wasn't expecting the knock was maybe the tiniest smidge of an understatement.

It was a soft sound, a gentle rapping rather than the bang her startled jump would have suggested. She twisted, blinking at the kitchen door for a moment before drying her hands and crossing to open it.

It wasn't like she didn't know who would be on the other side. If she hadn't, she might have remembered she wasn't wearing pants and considered doing something about it, or even thought about tracking down her knife first. But this wasn't some horror-movie stranger from the woods drawn by her lights, and so she thought nothing of turning the handle and swinging the door wide, unsurprised to see Jason there. Surprised only that he'd come at all.

"Hey," she said carefully.

There was something in the way he stood there, a tight, almost uncertain energy about him that made her soften her greeting, as though to be too loud or sharp might send him slipping back into the dying light from which he'd come. He seemed…almost dazed, confused as to how he came to be there or why. He was just looking at her, eyes shadowed, unreadable, and yet she couldn't help feeling that he seemed to be asking for something – direction, purpose, a way to shut out the noise in his own head.

She empathized.

Whitney was not too proud to admit that the sight of him felt something like a fine, thin blade being slowly pushed up into her gut, but there was no way in hell that she was going to turn him away.

Moving to the side, she offered: "do you want to come in?"

He hesitated, and it was clear he didn't know what he wanted.

She didn't even need to search her brain for something to say. It came naturally, rolling from her tongue as smooth as liquor down her throat. "Maybe we could do some reading? We're still working on that book…"

Jason's great shoulders slumped as though from heaving a sigh. It was almost imperceptible, barely a movement at all, and she might have missed it entirely had she not become so familiar with his mannerisms, the vast array of little micro-movements so vital to reading his emotions.

Slowly, cautiously, he stepped in through the doorway, ducking his head so as not to bang into the frame. She'd had to work much harder to get him inside last time. Tonight she needed just the invitation rather than repeated coaxing, yet she could tell it was not an easy thing for him to do. He was fighting the reflex to retreat, to return to the safety and freedom outside. So far the inclination to be with her was winning out, but she left the door open rather than close it behind him to eliminate the chance he might feel trapped or caged in.

She did, however, demand his coat.

"Off with it," she ordered gently, "you're dripping on my floor."

In truth, he wasn't really damp enough to drip. It hadn't been raining long or hard enough to set in his clothes, and at this rate it would peter out before it ever could, but that wasn't the point. The point was to get him to settle, to offer a bit of that direction he seemed to be looking for. If he caught on to her bullshit he didn't give any sign of it. He just did what he was told, slipping from the ragged quilted thing and handing it over so she could hang it on one of the hooks next to the pantry.

She didn't have much stomach for it now, but she went about making tea as planned purely for the sake of it being mundane and nonthreatening. It gave him time to acclimate, and gave her something to do that wasn't hovering over him while he did so, and by the time she had the water hot and teabag situated in a mug he seemed steady enough to move again.

Gathering tea, the jar of honey, and a spoon she made for the doorway.

"Come on," she coaxed, relieved when he followed her into the hall and the rec room beyond. "Sit wherever you like."

Jason lingered in the mouth of the hallway at first. She thought he might be surveying the room, taking in the layout and all the potential exits, and she waited patiently, occupying herself with setting the tea things down on the little end table next to the couch, scooping up the book left open on her chair and returning it to the bookshelf in exchange for the copy of Charlotte's Web they had been in the midst of reading before…everything. When she turned it was to see him cautiously approach the chair opposite hers and lower himself almost gingerly into it. To her relief, it didn't seem to be so small that he had to wedge himself into it.

Suppressing a smile, she padded back to the space before the hearth, the floor hard against her shins as she knelt next to the table.

"We got farther than I remember," she mused, unscrewing the mason jar of honey and spooning some into her tea. It was a pointless remark, but she had reason to believe pointless remarks tended to have a soothing effect on him, as this one seemed to.

Where before he had had sat stiff, all his joints sharp and hard edged, he seemed to be softening, easing steadily back into the thin cushioned seat and backing of the chair.

She scraped a drop of honey from the lip of the jar with a finger and tucked it absently into her mouth, making a happy little humming noise as she put the lid back on. Then, tucking her feet underneath her, she leaned until her hip met a pillow fallen from the makeshift bed, settled herself against it, and reached for the book.

"Now that school was over, Fern visited the barn almost every day, to sit quietly on her stool."

As she read, Jason gradually relaxed, the tension in his body slipping away like fog at the sound of her voice garnished with the pop and crackle from the fire. She read through a whole chapter, never once touching her tea.

She made it through half of another chapter when the logs behind the grate groaned and collapsed, pulling her from the pages with a small start. Marking her place with a bit of twine she set the book aside and went to the hearth. She added three more logs to the bit of wood reduced to carbon and glowing coals with a dry, crumbling crackle and a flurry of sparks before setting the grate back into place.

Straightening with a tiny groan she arched her back and stretched, easing the kinks from sitting in the same place for so long. Then she turned, just in time to catch the startled upward dart of Jason's eyes, the slight jerk of his head, and she would have sworn in front of any judge – bible or no – that he had been staring at her ass.

And maybe it was the heat from the coals not yet cooled from her flushed face making her head swim, or the fading night and hourglass minutes looming like a guillotine over her head. Maybe it was about controlling what couldn't be. Or maybe it was about nothing more than that she had been too lonely for too long and simply wanted to feel its opposite. Maybe she should just go back to her pillow and pick up the book and carry on like nothing had just happened.

But that wasn't what she did.

It took her a grand total of four steps to get to him, half of another to pivot and shift her weight – to plant a hand against his shoulder and lift herself so that she was sitting sideways across his lap. She felt him suck in a breath, sharp and thin as an arrow. His eyes had widened, his head rearing back as he stared at her in a way that was as much question as incredulity.

What are you doing?

What indeed.

She hadn't a fucking clue.

One arm of the chair was digging into her side, her knee wedged uncomfortably against the other. But she didn't feel it. How could she when he was right there, warm and solid against her, the rise and fall of his chest a little quicker than a moment ago. She felt the rhythm of it against her palm, beneath the time-worn softness of his shirt collar beneath her fingertips, though she didn't remember moving to touch him there.

This close, she could make out all the tiny imperfections in the surface of the mask. Nicks and scrapes, fine dents, chips in the painted chevrons at the brow and under the eyes. It enclosed his entire face, but the edge stopped, curving, before his ears. The worn old leather of the straps tucked behind them, over and around his skull. And below, just before the lower edge of the fiberglass dipped to engulf his chin, the very back corner of his jaw was visible. Strong, squared bone, bare skin absent any trace of scruff.

The compulsion was so sudden, so powerful that she moved as if swayed by the strings of gravity itself. She bent her head, fingers curling against his chest as she pressed her mouth to the innocuous little spot, just where jaw and ear met.

She felt the ragged stutter of his gasp, felt him jerk as if she'd electrocuted him, and quickly recoiled, flustered and promptly ashamed of herself.

What the hell did she think she was doing?

"I-I'm sorry," she stammered, "I'll stop—"

Jason was shaking his head in protest of her assurances, and she blinked at him, taken aback. She had thought for sure he would be relieved for her to remove herself and refrain from accosting him, but then she realized he wasn't actually giving her any signal to back off. He was still sitting as he had been, a little more rigid than before, maybe, but his hands were steady where they rested on the arms of the chair and his gaze was level when she sought it. She'd surprised him; that was all. He didn't want her to stop.

"Would you…"

Oh, she was going to hell.

"Would you do something for me?" He gave a tiny head-tilt of question, and she snagged the fabric of his shirt between her fingers to tug at it. "Take this off?"

Though he seemed somewhat nonplussed, he didn't hesitate. Splaying one hand over the front of his mask, the other reached back to grab a fistful of shirt. She watched him as he pulled the garment up and over his head, feeling much like a Victorian maiden all giddy and faint at the prospect of a sliver of bare wrist. Only he gave her much, much more than that.

His body was not what some would call a thing of beauty. As she'd imagined, he didn't have the definition of someone who sculpted and shaped their musculature like an art medium to fit some modern impression of the David statue. But also as she'd imagined, the definition he did have was raw, heavy, naturally constructed from having actually used it. From hauling fully grown people around all day until he could have fucking bench-pressed them if he wanted to.

She traced the thick lines of his neck with her stare, the prominent arc where clavicle met shoulder set above where the bicep began – and holy mother of god, his biceps. She followed the shallow lined that halved the slabs of muscle that made up his chest, which lined his sides through the taper of a powerful abdomen and all the way down to the topmost hints of solid hipbones.

Had her mouth just gone dry? It seemed such an extreme reaction, after all, she was no blushing, wide-eyed girl…except her eyes were wide, and she was blushing. Fiercely.

Jesus.

He seemed so much more...well, as stupid as it might have sounded, he seemed more like a man than either of her boyfriends-past – specifically a man, rather than a boy. She couldn't have articulated why. It wasn't that they had been all that young. Mike hadn't been, anyway. And Jason wasn't that much older than she, less than a decade. But somehow it felt that way; some combination of a maturity forced on him by a life without the cushions of modern convenience and his pure physicality, and damn if it wasn't working for her. She had actually gone a little breathless, for when she spoke again her voice came faint and high in her throat.

"It is…ok if I touch you?"

Up until now his eyes had been steady upon her face, watching her curiously while she gaped at him like a stupefied goldfish. They faltered now, ever so slightly – a faint, brief flare of uncertainty, before he offered a nod in answer.

She paused. It didn't seem like he didn't like the idea, more as if didn't understand why she would want to do it. He was way out of his element, and he knew that. But she knew it too. She needed him to understand that he didn't need to acquiesce to anything he didn't want just because she asked, or because he feared telling her no would drive her away, because it wouldn't. It was the closest she had ever come to being at eye-level with him, she realized – which still wasn't all that close, as she had to tip her chin up to meet his gaze.

"You don't have to say yes." He blinked, as if confused, and she leaned back by another inch to emphasize looking him full in the eye. "If you don't want. It's ok if you don't want me to do something. You understand?"

Jason's head tilted ever so slightly, absorbing her words. She felt his fingers brush her back, and then curl away, like it had when he'd reached for her face in the kitchen two nights ago.

"You can touch me," she reassured, "whenever you want. You don't have to ask every time."

A moment passed, counted out by the single contraction of his breath before he laid his hand against her side, cupping the curve of her waist and squeezing very gently. He nodded again, the bone white fiberglass gleaming in the firelight, and this time she didn't question the acknowledgement.

He understood.

Over time she had come to see the mask as his face, in a way, in spite of knowing perfectly well that it was merely a shield. It was different now, with the soft rush of breath hot against her cheek from behind the rows of perforation, she found herself wondering what he might look like underneath. He must have a nose and mouth, and she heard no wheeze or catch upon in- or exhale, which meant if he was somehow disfigured it couldn't be so debilitating as to affect the breath. Was he scarred? Were the features disproportional? Was it truly that bad, or was it simply that people had the propensity for immense cruelty within groups, encouraging drawing of lines between an us and an other? All she could clearly see were his eyes. The one was set ever so slightly lower than the other, which founded her theory at least in part. They were also quite beautiful, incredibly expressive, and lacking in lashes, she had discovered, or else the lashes were so fine and pale that she couldn't see them.

Was...would he be blushing under there? The genes that had put the hint of red in her hair also made her blush easily and thoroughly – all the way down to her chest if prolonged enough. She entertained the thought for a moment; a shy, sweet man flushing underneath the look given to him by a girl he fancied. The girl. There was only one, had only ever been one. And that was a heady thought.

What might his mouth look like, she wondered. His lips. Would they be narrow and clever, or full and soft? Somewhere in between?

The curiosity had bitten deep now, but it never occurred to her to ask. She was asking so much already, and he had relinquished so many of his safeguards for her. So she took that curiosity, folded it up, tucked it away, and satisfied herself with what she did have. Every glorious inch of it.

She let her hands trail over the heavy muscle of his arms, the skin there a little too pale but surprisingly smooth. There was a thick band of scar tissue which arced over his shoulder, as though someone had attempted to behead him and failed, their swing too wide, too shallow.

More scars dappled his chest and arms, and a mean, jagged slice ran along his side as though from an attempted gutting. His skin was a map of them: the marks of rough living, from learning by chance and risk and paying the price for not having any other choice. She ran a finger along one of the small, iridescent lines of an old, healed wound along his ribs. He didn't have much by way of hair, she noticed, a faint dusting down his forearms and not much else aside from the fine trail started below his navel, arrowing downward to disappear below his waistband.

Whitney could feel herself teetering on the edge of a precipice, toeing a line not quite yet crossed – one that, once crossed, she could never go back from.

She could hear the chime of warning in the farthest recesses of her head, but she was slipping beyond the reach of sense to save her.

Though, quite frankly, she wasn't sure she wanted it to.

~/~

The day had held an air of inevitability; the dragging pull of a great weight being pushed slowly off the lip of a cliff. From the moment dawn broke Jason had felt as though he were simply biding his time, waiting for the impact when it finally fell and crashed to the depths below.

The third day – the last day.

In hindsight, he didn't remember much of it. He remembered gathering the flowers, remembered laying them out in a long, lacy trail down the length of the railing. He didn't remember why. He remembered finding the beehive: having recollected that honeycomb was good, sweet, and that Whitney liked sweet things. He remembered the knowledge of having discovered as a child how to acquire it without being stung, but he didn't remember actually collecting it. Had almost forgotten about it entirely until the weight of the jar in his pocket stirred his memory.

He remembered her smile – he always remembered her smiles – remembered the pinkish-white flower she had selected from the mass he had brought and tucked into her hair, petals brushing the shell of her ear and so lovely that it seemed almost at home there.

He had left her then, for some reason that had made sense at the time. Or so he assumed. He hadn't intended to stay away, for as much as it had hurt to be near her, knowing how soon she would be gone, it hurt just as badly not to be…and if he must be in pain, he would much rather be with her than not. But then he had been deep in the woods with no idea how he'd ended up there or when it had gotten so dark or why he had left her at all. Why, when there was so little time left? Such precious time…

He had made for the lodge at a dead sprint as it began to rain, warm and misty as it often was in the late summer months, clambering over the rail of the porch and scattering flowers in his wake, to stand at her door. And if he had knocked, he had no memory of that, either. He had been bristling, limned with vivid energy and nothing to do with it, until the door opened to reveal her and the tight feeling of imminent collapse had softened to a whisper.

Her invitation inside scratched at the developed distaste he had for being inside certain spaces. That, at least, had felt normal, and he acquiesced for two reasons. First, because he had done so once and had not perished, and second because he refused to let his conditioned aversion interfere with what time he still had with her.

Her bustle about the kitchen had soothed him, centered him, as her nearness so often did now. She hadn't been wearing pants, he'd noticed, and though the shirt she wore was long it left much more of her legs bare than the dress had. There had been a hint of woodsmoke in her hair, and from the faint sounds emanating from the room beyond this one she had lit a fire.

He had let her lead him to another room, coax him into a chair that wasn't entirely comfortable, but was sturdy enough to take his weight. She had crossed the floor to a tall, narrow bookcase, exchanging an unfamiliar book to the one he recognized from so many years spent on his own shelf, laden with dust – shiny now, as it hadn't been since he was a child. She had opened the jar of honey he'd given her and spooned out a piece of comb and added it to the liquid in her cup, spoon and all. Then traced the rim of the jar, gathering an errant trickle of honey upon a fingertip.

A hot, familiar coil of tension twisted in the pit of his stomach when she had slipped that finger between her lips to lick it clean. His apparent obsession with her soft, pretty mouth – all the prettier just then, glistening golden with honey – making itself abruptly and insistently known until he shoved it back and out of sight.

He'd managed to forget it inside the sanctuary of the words as she read aloud. The room had been warm, the sounds of the fire and the rain melding with the lilt of her voice to create a kind of soothing music, and while the chair itself was a little too hard and a little too low to the floor, he had been lulled into a comfort that had felt like a scene from an old, familiar dream.

It had been more than nice, more than pleasant. It had been like a taste of something buried in his subconscious – something bright and sweet and wonderful that he had forgotten even how to want – made real again, suddenly no longer out of reach.

Then the fire had choked and spluttered, the rhythm of Whitney's voice abruptly quieting. It had been like being shaken from a stupor, leaving him disoriented, grasping for footing.

He had seen her move without fully paying attention as she rose and went to the hearth armed with a long stick of iron and a piece of fresh wood. She had bent at the waist, the hem of the shirt riding up as she did and his focus slammed back into reality, suddenly and utterly helpless to prevent his eyes from dropping to the long, sleek length of her bare thighs, to the faint lines of shadow framing the curves of her backside. He caught a glimpse of pale blue, something lacy and delicate, just before she straightened and realized that he'd been correct in his suspicion that she was no more clothed there than she had been in the dress.

Why this seemed to him lose equilibrium for a moment he wasn't precisely sure, but then she turned, going suddenly far too still, and he knew immediately that she'd caught him looking.

He shouldn't have been, he knew that, but he had been completely unable to help it, and then unable to look away. Guilt knotted at his insides, and he couldn't have said what he thought she would do. His mind was a blaze of panic and little else. She started toward him, and though he never in a thousand years would ever truly think her capable of striking him in real anger, he found he was steeling himself as if he expected it. It would have shocked him less than what she did do.

Jason had no idea what it was to be speechless, but he thought it might feel something like the way his mind instantly emptied of all tangible substance as it did when she settled across his legs. She was all he could feel; her weight against his lap, the soft press of her bottom, a sleek female shape next to his mass. Her fingers were curled into the front of his shirt, holding on as if for stability, or safety, and he liked it. He liked it far more than he should.

She tipped forward suddenly, out of his line of sight, and he felt her breath, her lips at the edge of his jaw, grazing the lobe of his ear.

The heat banked in his gut ignited, curling and breathing inside him like flame. He knew he had jumped, knew he had startled her, but she seemed to think it was because he didn't want her to touch him when that was the exact opposite of what he wanted. He didn't know any other way to tell her but to shake his head helplessly, to reject her apology as much as what she might have offered after…which, by some stroke of luck, seemed to have been satisfactory, for she didn't slip away.

She did look at him a little oddly, which made him more than a bit nervous.

"Would you do something for me?"

The question amused him. Evidently she didn't realize that he would do anything she asked, including removing his shirt, as she apparently wanted him to.

It was an easy enough thing, yet the instant he'd slipped his arms from the sleeves he suspected that what he'd thought she asked wasn't actually what she had asked at all. She hadn't wanted him to remove the clothing for its own sake, because it was dirty or unpleasant to touch, but because she wanted to look at him.

By now he had come to realize at least on a basis of logic that she must find something about him appealing. And yet to be faced with the concept that she might feel the same kind of magnetic pull toward him that he did to her, that she might be attracted to him was nothing short of baffling. It was the only way any ofthis made some kind of sense. It was the only way her putting her mouth to his skin

That was the exact moment when he put it together. She had kissed him. Not on the mouth, no, but for all that his only real experience with kissing was limited solely to what his mother had bestowed – little affectionate pecks to cheek or the top of his head – he could tell the difference between those and what Whitney had just done.

He was suddenly lightheaded, his lungs shuddering as he reached for air, sweat beading at his temples, slick at his chest and down his back. Fear, adrenaline, excitement.

"Is it…ok if I touch you?"

Her voice was at a lower register than normal, almost hoarse, but not quite. Hoarse implied roughness from damage, like screaming. This wasn't like that. He recognized the tilt of a question, nodded without thinking, and when she pulled back to look at him more directly he didn't understand why she seemed so concerned.

He reached without thinking, fingers grazing the thin, almost silky cloth of the shirt she wore, and flinched back reflexively. And that was why had said those things, told him: "you don't have to say yes." She had been doing what he what he so often did; seeking permission, not wanting to overstep.

"You can touch me," she said now, husky, warm. "Whenever you want."

He didn't dare do more than lay his hand against her side, as he'd been going to, didn't dare because the next thing he knew her fingers were tracing the skin over his collarbones and trailing down his arms. He still felt grimy, though he had scrubbed himself near to raw yesterday. Yet it wasn't enough to warrant interrupting her.

She couldn't possibly not feel him growing hard beneath her, and he felt his face flame with a heat that was as much shame as it was the heady pleasure of her nearness, of her hands on him. Yet if she noticed she gave no sign of it. Her eyes were dark, almost glazed, her gaze angled to where she dragged her palms down his chest, gentle fingertips outlining the scars he had grown to ignore. He could feel her trembling, a fine, deeply-internalized shiver he felt echoed in his own bones.

He had to touch her.

He had to.

It was a compulsion, a need, not any controllable urge or craving but a need as fierce as breathing. He cast his discarded shirt to the floor with a muted thump of cloth to free his hand and lifted it to her shoulder, bare where the neck of her shirt had slid down to expose it. The skin was luminous as if lit from within – as if the drop of honey she'd consumed had been absorbed and begun to glow. He touched her there, fingertips brushing the crest of the joint, then over along the delicate arc of a collarbone to the hollow at the base of her throat. His hand slid back, cupping the side of her neck, part of him almost surprised when she didn't flinch at the curve of his fingers at her nape, in the shallow notch under her fragile jawbone.

In that moment he was extremely aware of just how deeply she must trust him if she was letting him do this, in spite of every reason she had not to. True the grip was not at all like the one he would have used with the intent to cause harm, but he could have, and that she would allow him to put a hand around her neck was no small thing.

Something tender and possessive took his heart in a gentle fist. Lamenting that he had no way to express any of it, he stroked softly with his thumb, not realizing until he had that the place was the mirror to where she had kissed him.

Not until her head tipped back, her lips parting, and desire slid between his ribs like a knife.

It was strange, he had never really thought much about kissing. He remembered his mother's, the quick little doses of affection or comfort, to soothe a wound, and he had been loosely aware of the other kind of kiss that he'd witnessed some of the older campers and counselors engage in, or what he had assumed must be that. It had always looked so unpleasant: mouths crammed together, open, almost as if they were eating each other in a truly appalling way. He had relegated the activity to something he would never understand and determined to ignore it.

But now as he found his eyes locked once again to Whitney's mouth, pink and lush and glistening, he thought he might understand a little better than he'd anticipated.

Since he had first donned his sackcloth shroud upon his resurrection he had never thought to remove it. He'd had to occasionally, in the rare moments he had to assuage a dwindling hunger and clean his teeth after, or to wash. It had always been a product of unfortunate necessity. He had never wanted to. Yet now, as he stared down at Whitney's lovely upturned face, her eyes shuttered and lips parted as if in some kind of anticipation he wanted very much to seize his shield under the chin, cast it off, and bend his head to kiss her.

It was foolish, impulsive, a there-and-gone stab of need that throbbed as it faded. He knew better than to ever have followed such an urge. Any attempt at such a gesture would be clumsy at best. Disastrous at worst. He was not exactly adept at using his mouth for even simple things. To attempt something so intimate, with someone so soft...the fleeting thought of the damage he might unwittingly do terrified him. Besides, she wouldn't want to kiss something so malformed and ugly. Not like that.

A sound left her – a hard, shallow exhale too forceful to be called a sigh. Her hand found his arm, his skin prickling with a fine, swift shock of awareness as her fingers curled into his flesh as if she needed the stability.

He adjusted on instinct, hand sliding up and around to her back...no more than half a second before she moved.

~/~

She felt drunk.

She couldn't think…needed to think. The heat of his skin was cloying in her blood, her temples, the beat of his heart steady and strong against her palms, and she couldn't string together the sense to remember why she should probably take a minute and breathe.

Vaguely she heard something soft hit the floor, then she felt his hand skim the slope of her shoulder, the shallow dip at the base of her neck. She swallowed reflexively as the callused pads of his fingertips slid along her throat, around the back of it, grazing gently over the thundering pulse point beneath her jaw. And how was it that this, just a touch, could be more arousing than a kiss? She'd had a mouth at her neck before, though not as often as she might have liked. Mike hadn't really been attuned enough to notice her breath change whenever he did it, hadn't noticed the enthusiasm. Jason was far, far more perceptive.

The tip of his index finger brushed the soft space of skin just below her ear, and when her breath caught on a gasp and her eyelids fluttered he took note, repeating the action – slowly, deliberately, dragging his finger down.

Her head lolled back, baring her throat like an animal exposing a tender belly in submission. Liquid heat pooled in her belly, giving a single sharp throb.

Fuck.

She gripped him by the arm, nails biting into the thick muscle in part to steady herself and in part for leverage. Planting the other flat against his chest for balance she shifted her weight forward, twisting until she straddled him. He was rather wider in the thigh than Mike had been, which meant her knees had to be much farther apart to do this than she recollected and turned what might have been no more than a slightly suggestive position downright crude.

And clearly something about this struck him on an instinctual level, for she could feel the muscle beneath her tighten at the new distribution of her weight, the press of her ass, possibly even the way she'd spread her legs to put herself there. His hand had splayed across her back as she'd rearranged herself, apparently in effort to provide support – it fell now to her waist, curving around the arc of her hip as if to hold her back and away from the bulge between his thighs. Or else in the hope to keep her from noticing.

As if she wasn't hyper aware of every part of him that touched her. So much so that she barely felt the painful way her knees were wedged against the frame of the chair.

Yet as decisive as she had felt just a second ago, now she faltered. The nature of conversation between them, and the limits thereof, had never truly bothered her before. It didn't now either, but she wasn't above admitting that his silence was making her a little anxious. She was still unsure whether he actually wanted this or whether she was pushing and he was just being polite or tolerant, and that he couldn't tell her…that she couldn't press him for more than a nod or head shake, worried her. It wasn't just the typical nervousness from being with someone new either, the half-nauseous mix of uncertainty and shyness, but a very real concern of taking advantage.

Women weren't the only ones capable of being coerced into sexual contact under states of dubious consent, and she was painfully cognizant of how much power she held over him. She didn't want to put him in the position of doing something he didn't want just to make her happy, or because he wasn't sure he could tell her not to. Frankly, he might not even know what the heck he thought or felt. She wanted him to want this – want her. But she would rather stay as they had been, and stay away, than accidentally force him. God forbid she scar him for life because she couldn't control herself – and that had not been something she'd imagined herself capable of until this exact moment. It would be no different than outright rape, and she couldn't stomach the risk of...she just couldn't.

She wasn't really sure what to do now. Oh, she knew what she wanted to do. She wanted to lick her way down his chest, starting at the throat and ending at that intriguing place still concealed by clothes…but that seemed way more intense than he might be ready for. Given a choice, she would have started things slowly, spend some time just kissing and not much else. But that wasn't an option here. So how did she go about issuing a question he might not yet fully grasp in a way that was clear but not manipulative?

Slowly she let her hand slip down between heavy pectorals, grazing a soft path along his sternum.

Jason's breathing changed, roughened, and for a moment she wavered, wondering if she should just stop altogether. But he didn't appear to want her to. The way he was looking at her; so clearly, intently focused, and with a heat she had seen there only the once.

She didn't think anyone had ever looked at her like that, with such uncontained hunger. She had always thought that such a misplaced word to use for desire, an unfitting comparison. Not now. Now she understood there was a reason people used it, for she felt it too – a gnawing, empty yearning that had transcended mere wanting to feel as though if she didn't sate it somehow, it would devour her alive.

Was his mouth open, she wondered? Lips parted in anticipation?

On pure reflex at the thought she wet her own lips and his eyes dropped, following the dart and slide of her tongue. She felt her stomach tighten.

He seemed quite taken with her mouth. They had had a lot of time to study one another, after all, for familiarities to shift and change from simple acknowledgement of existence to curiosity, to fascination of an entirely different kind. She was quite taken with parts of him, too, though her ability to make out details had been greatly hindered up until now.

Her hand drifted lower, trailing down the ridges of his ribs – muscle coiling taut beneath skin at the touch. He shifted slightly, and while she suspected it was more to do with the newness of it than any real discomfort, she asked: "ok?"

She could feel the effort he made to relax, to trust her. He did trust her. He would follow her lead, and she would do her damndest to deserve it.

He nodded, if somewhat stiffly, and she let her fingertips drift lower still to graze the waistband of his heavy workpants.

She saw his throat work, felt the hand at her side twitch. He didn't push at her, or make any other obvious indication of dislike or unease, but there was a hint of something wild and not-quite-sure in his eyes that had her deviating from her original half-plan. The last thing she wanted was to traumatize him more than she likely already had. So instead of setting to them, she bypassed button and zipper entirely to let her palm slide down the hard ridge beneath.

He stiffened, the breath leaving him in a broken rush.

She bent her wrist, dragging her palm back up, pressing ever so slightly, and his grip on her tightened almost painfully in what she was certain must be a plea for her to stop. Yet when she made to remove her hand he seized her wrist and held her there, cupping him through the rough cloth. And that was clear enough to be getting along with. Whether or not he was entirely comfortable, he didn't want her to stop, either. Determined consent wasn't quite the same as enthusiastic, but he was not a child, and he was not simple-minded. She wasn't going to start something and then make his choices for him by not seeing it through when he was quite plainly telling her to.

Gently she stroked with her fingertips, as much an indication of understanding as a continuation, and felt the rigid flesh beneath her twitch. He released a shallow breath and his hand fell away, dropping to the seat of the chair and curling around the edge of it, and the sight of this indomitable man – this great, cataclysmic force – relinquishing the control he clearly held very dear for her was...enthralling.

She watched him closely as her hand slid down, watched his uneven shudder at her touch. When she squeezed, ever so gently, his back arched. Powerful shoulders bunched, the tendons in his neck cording like steel cable. He almost bucked her off, might have succeeded had he not gripped her tightly. So tightly that she was almost positive she was going to bruise down to the bone of her hip and couldn't bring herself to care. She could see the throb of his pulse beneath the skin of his neck and leaned forward, draping an arm over the back of the chair to press her mouth there, breathing in the rich, clean scent of his skin, tasting salt.

A soft sound of pleasure escaped her as her lips parted, the tip of her tongue tracing a slow, hot line up the column of his throat. It was complete impulse, and the response was immediate.

Though there was no voice to give it true tone or texture she felt the groan unfold from deep in his chest – felt as it splintered and his head tossed back, lungs heaving. She felt the spasm deep in his thighs just as it preceded the pulsing throb and the warm rush of the release beneath her palm; fast and hard and nothing short of glorious. And while at first all she felt was the dizzy, soaring high of satisfaction, it curdled swiftly into remorse as rationality bled into her brain.

She drew back, searching for his face. His eyes were wide and wild, and for an awful, sinking second she was sure she shouldn't have done it. Any of it. She had pushed him too far, and way, way too fast.

So much for not traumatizing the poor man.

"I'm so—I'm so sorry, I…are you ok?"

The nod he gave her was loose, downright wobbly – like that of a man intoxicated.

"Did you...like it?"

She didn't know why she felt suddenly shy after what had just happened, but there it was. Just because he'd responded physically didn't necessarily mean he'd enjoyed it, and she wasn't going to assume. Though she probably could have given him a damn moment before pestering.

With notable effort he pried his left hand from around the edge of the chair. There was a faint tremor in his fingers when they curled under her chin and jaw, urging her to meet his eyes, and while he looked a little dazed when he nodded the second time she recognized the deliberateness of this moment of communication. The emphasis in touching her face, in waiting for eye contact.

Yes, he was saying. Very much.

His thumb stroked the slope of her chin, a soft, affectionate brush. Soft. Quite unlike the flesh beneath her palm.

It was then that she realized her hand was still resting against his groin, stained dark now and damp, and that he was…still hard. The realization made her throat tighten, made the fine, sensitive muscles tucked between her thighs clench instinctively, gripping at nothing and aching in complaint for it. The wetness followed, a hot rush of it bleeding into the crotch of too-small panties already damp enough to chafe. And holy god, she was so turned on that she physically hurt – the throb between her legs fierce as a wound. So turned on that she couldn't stop the flex of her hand atop the not insignificant shape of the cock beneath his stained fly, couldn't stop the instinctive arch of her lower back to press her greedy cunt down into the broad length of his thigh or the broken gasp that left her at the increase in pressure.

He was so observant, so keen-eyed and watchful and of course he noticed. She could see it in the faint furrow at the inner corners of his eyes, the question that formed as they flickered down to that place veiled by the draping hem of her too-large shirt, the gears turning as he recollected what she had just done to him and fit the pieces together.

What she had just done to him. Which was give him a hand-job through his fucking pants.

He shifted faintly underneath her, pressing unintentionally up into her hand. How was he still…? Yeah, it happened, but after the first time?

Scientifically she wasn't sure if there was any real correlation between stamina and biological imperative, but the needy spasm of her vaginal muscles clearly either believed this to be the case or else simply didn't give a damn.

Suddenly it was difficult to breathe. She could feel her own rapid heartbeat in her throat and temples, and…elsewhere, as she eased her hand from his groin. She could feel the line of each of his fingers where they lay against her hip. He was still staring up at her, his pupils blown wide, irises dark mirrors of the same lust clouding her own brain, pooling at the base of her spine and low in her belly.

Well. This had certainly…escalated.

A reflexive shiver chased its way up her spine, a chill that wasn't a chill, and she knew what would follow, knew he couldn't possibly miss the tightening of her nipples when she was wearing a shirt like this with no bra. He was practically at face-level with her chest, for fuck's sake. But he wasn't paying attention to her breasts, even with proximity and rapid breath. He was paying attention to the way she had just squirmed against his lap as she eased her hand from his groin, his eyes once again flicking from the juncture of her thighs back up to her face.

Oh, he was putting it together all right, and already doing better than many men with five times his experience. That was her Jason, though: sharp-eyed, attentive, and clever.

Her Jason.

~/~

He was shattering, splitting apart at the seams.

His brain was short-circuiting, spitting sparks like a split wire, his heart pounding fit to burst, and he was utterly consumed with her. The scent of her thick in his lungs, the hot press of her open mouth, her hand – the hand not currently stroking him through the front of his trousers – curled around the back of his neck, at once soothing and overwhelming.

She touched him, touched the flesh that concerned and almost repelled him, as though she knew exactly what it was, as though there was a purpose…and if there was he couldn't think what it might be when he was helpless to do anything but feel. Trapped within an improbable blend of bliss and total agony. He didn't understand how it could be possible to be at once so intensely uncomfortable and to feel so remarkably good. But it was. He did. The point of pain that wasn't really pain centered in his groin and radiating outward until it became all that he was.

His vision had blurred, both dark and alight with a thousand burning stars as his eyes rolled back into his head and he seemed to break upon the razor edge of oblivion. The pleasure was so violent that it hurt, slicing through every shred of him at once. Yet what followed was an immediate, sweeping relief he could only have described as euphoric.

Every part of him relaxed – places he hadn't even known could relax had relaxed. His joints had all become loose and liquid and his veins awash with a warm…fizziness. It reminded him of what seltzer water felt like against the tongue, both strange and incredibly pleasant.

Was this what people experienced when they mauled one another like they did – groping and rolling around? Was this complex combination of sensation the driving purpose?

If so, no wonder they were always doing it.

Whitney's voice broke through the haze, carrying with it a concern he didn't understand, asking if he was all right as though she didn't know that he had never been more all right.

He could tell from the way his hand had gone lax against her that his fingers had been digging into the soft flesh above her hipbone. How hard had he clutched at her? Enough to hurt? She didn't look as though she was in pain, though he couldn't actually focus enough to interpret the set of her features.

When his eyes cleared it was to find her still watching him with traces of worry. She had been so confident before, so sure in her knowledge of what to do. Now she seemed unsure. Flustered? She looked nervous. Why did she look nervous? Did she regret what she had done, regret touching him? Making him feel…whatever that wondrous, nameless euphoria had been? But, no, that wasn't it. He didn't think so, anyway. She looked more like she was waiting to be scolded for having done something wrong. The only reason he knew was because he was intimately familiar with the feeling.

He didn't know quite what to make of that. At least not until she asked her second question.

Had he liked it.

Had he liked it?

Even if Jason had possessed the power of speech he seriously doubted his ability to articulate exactly how much he had liked it. Even enough to stress that liking was nowhere near strong enough word. He had to speak through his eyes, through the soft touch he bestowed to her face with a hand still wracked with a fine tremor from nerves that felt like a burned up fuse – in a good way. He had to settle for a nod as pointed as he could make it, and relief that it was enough to ease the doubt creased between her sleek dark brows.

He cupped her chin, warm tenderness flooding him as though injected through his very bloodstream as he looked up into her face, beautiful and familiar. Beloved.

The reason for this…pastime – activity? – didn't lie in the sensation alone, he realized. It was just as much the emotion, the indescribable sense of connection, of belonging. The all-consuming rush of pleasure was well enough, but this…this was far more wondrous.

Whitney fidgeted where she sat astride his legs, shifting as if uncomfortable. Her hips angled down, her breath giving way to a tiny, almost indiscernible noise. In the same moment her hand flexed against his groin, sending a fresh, hot bolt of need searing through him, and in that instant it felt as though something in his brain clicked – at long last – into place.

He was hungry for her. A hunger not of the belly but of his very flesh – in his bones and in his mind, down to whatever crude matter had collected to construct him. And oh, how his body wanted her, strained toward her. Again? Or, still? He didn't know. He just knew that he still throbbed, still whined like an over strained pressure-valve. And she…why did she still look uncomfortable?

She was tense all over, near-vibrating with it, her face flushed and tight as if in pain or nervousness. There was dampness seeping through the leg of his pants, almost like...

His eyes fell, instinctively searching for the source. His brain was quick to think it blood – like the time of the urgent midnight demand for either bathroom or bandages. Only, that didn't seem quite right. He would have smelled blood. But she didn't smell of metal and pain. She smelled of warm skin and lemon- sweetness, and something else. That something he still didn't know how to name.

Had she been injured, hurting, she wouldn't have pressed herself into him the way she had, wouldn't be looking at him the way she was now, lips parted and cheeks flushed pink, the green in her eyes almost completely eliminated by the gold so that they appeared almost aflame.

He studied her face sharply as she removed her hand almost warily from the front of his pants, not needing to look to know there was moisture there too, and of his own making. The exact functionality escaped him, but he could draw the link without her needing to tell him. Was that was this was? If so, then why hadn't she reacted the way he had? How could she not have, had she felt what he had? Why did she still look as though she was nursing a wound, brow creased and jaw tight? Unless…

He glanced back down to place where her thighs met, veiled by the excess length of her shirt. Just as there were differences between the size and shape of their bodies there seemed to be differences here as well. She didn't feel the way he did, but silken, pliable, as she was everywhere.

If he touched her the way she had touched him…

The heat coiling anew in Jason's belly gave an enthusiastic clench at the thought, yet he hesitated, suddenly cowed.

What was he doing? He had no right to look at her like this, let alone touch her. But, no, that wasn't it. It wasn't that he had no right, rather that she had every right. She should not have wanted him…but she did. There was no way to calculate his awe. And he had no right to refuse her, even if any small, insignificant part of him had wanted to. Which it vehemently, violently, did not.

Cautiously he lifted right leg, bending his knee ever so slightly, experimentally. The response was instant. He watched, entranced, as her head tipped back, her eyes fluttering closed in unmistakable relish. Her back arched, pressing the soft, burning place between her legs against him, and emitting that sound – that breathy, gasping sigh that was both and neither and exquisite. His fingers curled into the cloth draping her hip, gathering the excess to lift it out of the way and exposing the sleek, supple flesh of her thighs. The light was dim, though not so dim that the dazed wanting in her face was veiled, or the contrast of his great killer's hands against skin smooth as milk and honey.

He smoothed the hem of the shirt back, revealing the pale blue garment he had glimpsed beneath – trimmed in lace and fit tight to her shape – and he couldn't make out much through it, but judging by the way he went slightly lightheaded, something buried deep within him recognized even what he could not clearly see with immediate and instinctual reverence.

Unthinking, he traced the edge of the silky cotton at the crease where thigh met body, and he could feel the incredible heat emanating from her there. Burning hot as fever.

"Oh, god," she whimpered, and he paused, checking her face quickly.

He knew the phrase (in exclamation form) purely as a reaction to fear, to imminent death. But that wasn't why she'd said it. It was trepidation, and it was desire.

Encouraged, he turned his wrist, copying the motion she had used with him but far gentler. She had displayed far more knowledge of how his body worked than he had of hers, and as intent as he was on learning, he could not abide the thought of hurting her even by accident.

Still, the grip of her knees about his thighs was not insignificant, nor was that of her hand at his forearm. Small she might be, fragile, breakable – she was not, however, weak.

His fingertips met moisture, slick and warm, soaked through the cloth that shielded her. And as if touching had forged some kind of direct pathway he could smell her as he hadn't even before – rich and earthy, honey and salt. Would it taste so, were he to bring his fingers to his mouth?

More importantly, had he ever wanted to do anything so badly in his life?

She canted her hips again, causing that soft, sweet place to press into the heel of his hand…and he had thought himself hard before. He'd had no idea.

~/~

Pleasure for a woman was always a weighted thing, conditional. Dangerous. There was risk for her in wanting, not only the risk of pregnancy, but of her desire being met with judgment, condemnation, or worse. She had to be careful what things she asked for, else she be deemed too easy, too frigid, of not meeting expectation, and punished for it. It wouldn't always come right away, either, but hours or days later when an action made in a moment of abandon might suddenly become a weapon to be used against her.

Whitney had never been abused outright, but she had always been mindful of the fact that the men in her life had the potential to become abusive even without meaning to be – and more than likely as a result of factors beyond their control. Maybe it had been self-sabotage, setting all her potential relationships up to inevitable failure. Maybe it had been a wise response to unpleasant truths fortified as such by words passed on from other women. Maybe neither. Or maybe both. At first it had been because she was young and silly and scared. And then it had been because she had learned of the dangers, the weighted nature of her own wants laid upon her by a system that sought to control her. Even those who might love her.

She had made her peace with it as she had with bleeding every month – with a bitterness that grew resigned, and then unthinking with time. It was the way of things, and it was far less work and pain to navigate it than to try and rail against it, at least at this point in her life.

That was what she'd believed. Right up until she hadn't.

It had occurred to her before that the same social conditioning that formed the foundation for all that had left Jason almost entirely untouched. She had intended to think on that, to consider what it might mean, and hadn't really done so. At least, not consciously. Subconsciously, however, was a different story.

The irony did not escape her: that this man brought up knowing only the most primitive elements of social conduct had treated her with consistently more real respect than almost every man raised within her own modern world (abduction aside). Even her own brother had needed repeated assurances that she would be fine if he left her when the proof of her words had been right in front of his eyes – not because he intended to slight her, but because he had been raised to see her as requiring his protection even, and perhaps especially, from herself.

Due to simple circumstance, Jason was the only person truly capable of taking her exactly as she was. He didn't see her as less than, as weak or silly, or irrational – even when she actually was being ridiculous. The only deference he ever made was to her physical differences; her size, her strength, the length of her limbs in comparison to his own. Other than that, to his mind, she was every bit as capable as he was in every way. And if he was overly cautious or protective or anything of the like, it was because she was important to him, not because he felt he had to coddle her on principle. She hadn't realized how much she had wanted that until it was right in front of her, and she thought she might have recognized that part of him before anything else. Certainly before the pesky ovaries had gotten involved.

Of one other thing she was certain. Jason wasn't going to care that she had more experience than he did, that she had been with someone else before him. He wasn't going to think her a slut. The concept didn't exist to him. Frankly, he seemed pretty thrilled with her knowledge, and the absolute rarity that made him was both sad and incredibly freeing.

She might not have cognitively realized all this if it hadn't been for how unguarded she had just been, how content she had been to cross a line into territory that should have scared her, completely unafraid of reprisal because she had known for the first time in her life, with absolute certainty, that it wouldn't come.

She could be exactly who she was, want what she wanted, and he would never punish her for it.

He shifted, pressing tentatively up with his knee into the throb between her legs, striking sparks. It hurt – in the most delicious way – and she arched into the flare of pleasure, her nails biting into the flesh just below his elbow.

It never felt like this. It had never been better with Mike than it had been on her own, at least in terms of physical pleasure. It had been good in other ways, the sense of connection, of bonding, but never both.

This was both.

His hands were at her hips, pulling up the overlong hem of her stupid shirt, and pulling her half an inch closer to him. It wasn't intentional. He did it unconsciously, in effort to remove the obstacle, but that was perhaps why it struck her the way it did. Holy hell, but he was strong. It should have scared her – he could literally hold her down, do whatever he wanted with her, and there would be nothing she could do to stop him unless he chose to relent. And that should not have sent a jagged throb of lust straight to her cunt. But it did.

His skin was hot against the curve of her hip as he folded the fabric back and out of the way. His other hand lowered, touching the stupid lacy trim of the borrowed underwear not an inch from where she was literally aching for him to touch her. His gaze was cast down, studying her, and surely he couldn't know what he was looking at but the dark fog of heat in his eyes would have had her believe otherwise.

"Oh, god…"

He glanced back up to her face, holding her gaze as his hand slid down, not quite cautious, not meaning to tease. It was slow and tentative, careful. He was trying not to hurt her, unsure exactly how he should touch her. It wasn't his fault that she was wound so tight that the faint graze across her clit was enough to make her want to cry.

She had meant to sit still and let him explore her at his own pace. But she was far too into him, and too far gone to wait.

Reaching between them she gripped his hand. He went instantly still, clearly thinking she was saying no – and god as her witness she could have fallen in love with him just for that – and she fought to muster the breath to reassure him, but she couldn't. Wordless, she cupped the back of his hand and moved it to the top of her underwear, tucking their intertwined fingers beneath the fabric and wishing she'd had the forethought to take them off before hurling herself at him.

She jerked when he reached her, for all that she had guided him there – hot and wet and swollen – her exhale almost more akin to a sob than a moan. Pleasure burned, bleeding through her veins, curling up her spine. Her hips arced, pressing her clit into the heel of his palm. Her vision went white.

His eyes were trained to her face with the focus of a hunter, so attentive to the shifts of her expression as she shaped his fingers with her own and showed him how to move. He hardly blinked at all, watching intently as she rocked into his hand, into the glide of his fingers against her. He was utterly absorbed in her – in watching her, touching her, drinking in what it was to be there with her.

It was, without a doubt, the hottest thing she had ever experienced.

Her face was burning. The embarrassment was silly, she knew that. He had no expectations, no preconceived notions of how this worked. She was flustered because this was so out of the realm of normal for her and yet she was liking it as much as she was, half of which was because her own hand was still entwined with his, and he showed no inclination to shoo her away. She had no doubts that he was both driven and perceptive enough to figure it out on his own from this point just from her reactions alone, but he seemed to feel the same intense sense of connection that she did. Which just made it that much hotter.

Whitney didn't actually remember the last she had done this – kissed or touched or anything – without something else going on in the back of her mind. Grocery lists, errands to run, whether or not she'd remembered to turn on the crockpot that morning. There was nothing in her head now. Nothing but the precise texture of his skin against hers, the soft, slick sounds of her own wetness, his breathing hard and close to panting, seemingly matched to the sharp, shallow pace of her whimpering gasps. It was downright vulgar.

She came hard and fast, her entire body convulsing as she tipped headfirst into the blinding, building scream of her own pleasure.

Seconds or hours later she collapsed against him, boneless as a ragdoll. Her hand curved around the back of his neck, fingers curling into the wispy strands of his hair, and gripped as though to save herself from drowning.

Her pulse was a frantic thunder in her ears, her thighs trembling where they bracketed his. The only thing preventing her from slipping to the floor in a mindless heap the broad hand against her back, and was it her imagination, or was he trembling too?

Holy…

She couldn't finish it – couldn't even curse in her own mind.

Well, she had just experienced the single most powerful orgasm of her life. Her bones had been reduced to splinters. She supposed an inability to string thoughts together came with the territory.

For long moments she just rested there, her head against his shoulder as her lungs re-learned how to go about breathing, and he let her. Gently he extricated their joined hands from her panties. Disentangling himself from her limp fingers he looped his arm about her waist, his other hand splayed warm and secure between her shoulder blades. She knew he was still hard beneath her, though she couldn't directly feel it. But he didn't seem inclined to do anything about it, perfectly content, it seemed, just to hold her.

At some point she felt his head angle toward her, the little nicks and scratches marring his mask catching at her hair. Then the slight pressure as he rested his face against the side of her head.

I've got you, it seemed to say. Or, so she told herself. She couldn't bring herself to imagine what else it might have said.

She lifted her head to look at him and found the softness in his eyes – the same as before, and yet…somehow quite different. Affection, and also devotion. Wonderful, beautiful. Damning. It hit her as it hadn't before, now that the throes of pleasure were fading to a pleasant glow, what had just happened.

She pushed herself shakily backward and clambered from his lap…only for her knees to give out as soon as her feet met the floor.

She staggered, emitting a muted squeak, but Jason had her before reflex reduced her to flailing, great hands folding around her waist to hold her steady until she could stand on her own.

When he let her go it was with an air of reluctance, as though he would much rather pull her back to him, keep her cradled there against him indefinitely. He didn't, but she imagined he was probably considering it when she smoothed the shift back down, and while he tracked her shaky steps across the room and up the stairs.

It was not an easy trek. She was unsteady; her spine was tingling and her knees were weak, like some newly born animal with too much leg to handle, and she was having difficulty focusing on where to put her feet, as though she couldn't make out the dimensions of the steps beneath her. It was like she had been fucked so thoroughly that she had been robbed of her ability to walk, to think, to see straight. Jesus, he hadn't even actually fucked her. Not yet, anyway.

Ok, stop. Stop right there.

Planting a hand on the door to the tiny bathroom she shoved it open and half-stumbled inside.

It wasn't regret which had driven her from him. It wasn't. Simply the need for space in order to think and an equal need to see to the absolute mess she now was. The borrowed panties had been marginally uncomfortable before, but they were completely saturated and chafing something awful, though she did suspect they had been stretched out beyond repair. Jason had big hands, after all. Big, dexterous, and quick to learn.

Fucking hell.

Thankfully the toilet paper under the sink was the kind that came in individually wrapped rolls and therefore had not been reduced to wads of dust. It wasn't as good as a washcloth, but the cloths folded neatly atop the matching pair of hand towels were at least two shades paler than the avocado green they were supposed to be and therefore out of the question. Slipping from the ruined underwear she dropped them into the little metal waste canister, cleaned up as best she could, then sank limply onto the toilet. Just sat there, head at once completely empty and full of noise.

What had she just done? In her recklessness she had bound him to her, irrevocably. He would never get her out from under his skin now. And neither would she.

She had no idea how long she spent there, ruminating over mistakes she couldn't bring herself to regret all the while condemning herself for them. Long enough for the dizzy high of incredibly good sex to wane, for her eyes to grow heavy and her temples begin to ache.

When she made her way back downstairs it was to find Jason seated on the floor, back against the front of the couch, his face to the gradually dying fire. Next to him, she noticed, he had reassembled her bed-substitute; the motley assortment of cushions and blankets carefully arranged, situated just near enough to the hearth that she could tell it was in intentional proximity to the warmth.

She had to work to swallow past the knot in her throat.

There was no way he didn't hear her, but he didn't turn his head as she padded along the back of the couch to where she had been keeping her bag of clothes. The pair of clean underwear she had laid there for the morning still had a hint of dampness clinging stubbornly to the fibers, but it wasn't enough to be either problem or annoyance, and she quickly slipped them on before rounding the other side of the couch opposite from him.

He was sitting at an angle to the hearth in order to stretch his legs out in front of him, body tilted inward toward the pillow end of the tidy bed-nest. He had put his shirt back on, and while a part of her instantly mourned the loss, she was also grateful for the sliver of sanity it granted back to her.

He tilted his head to look at her, at once greeting and cautious. Would she rather he had left, he was wondering, and would she now ask him to leave? He seemed to have understood her need to clean up, but she was not above admitting that her manner of going about it had been less than gracious, or clear. She must have seemed upset, and he had been hoping that wasn't the case – or else that he could soothe it by meeting her with a place to rest, because of course he had. He would know, as he knew so much just by intuition alone, that she needed to sleep.

It was strange…she had felt anxious, almost to the point of nausea, up until the very second he had looked at her, wondering how she was going to deal with any of it – with him, or herself, or any of it. But now she was just tired, and none of the rest mattered.

Crouching, she folded back the blankets, noting the brilliant use of the sleeping bag, opened all the way up, as a buffer between the couch cushions rather than just a sheet. She lay down, curled up under the pile of blankets, and nestled her head upon the pillow next to his hip. And maybe it should have been awkward, weird, to lay like that with him seated next to her, above her. But it wasn't. She just felt that same sense of absolute safety she recalled from the lakeside, secure in his presence, calmed, and unafraid.

Ever since she could remember there had been nights when her heart seemed to go to war with her mind. Sometimes it seemed the most difficult and agonizing decisions were made in the dark, where the struggles between what was known and what was felt had room to spread out and realign. Most of the time nights like these were spent in restless wakefulness and were a far cry off from restful.

It wasn't that way tonight.

The last thing burned into her consciousness the warm red-orange glow of dimming firelight and the faint touch of a gentle hand stroking her hair. And then she slept. Easy, and deep.


NOTES:

First off - credit to E.B. White for the line from "Charlotte's Web."

Second off - you're welcome. (Just kidding! Sort of…)

This entire chapter is RIDICULOUS and I don't give a single solitary fuck. I'm a girl who likes her long, sprawling, intricate smut scenes because I like the way it focuses like the actual acts would in real life (just me? Maybe so). But I understand if it's not to everyone's taste. We probably won't have anything quite this insane again simply because this was a slooooowww goddamn burn finally hitting its boiling point and there were a lot of firsts. It'll still be ridiculous, though. That I can absolutely promise.

A couple things I want to touch on: the first being my use of the c-word.

I realize this is very often used as an insult and has been pretty negatively coded. The reason I use it is that I pretty much hate the words most often used to refer to lady-bits in writing. I don't like the flowery sugary euphemisms in historical novels unless they're being used as literal descriptors (see almost any floral Georgia O'Keefe painting if you don't know what I mean), and I hate pretty much every slang word that exists. If we go with pure anatomical language we're stuck with bits and pieces or internal parts, which doesn't work. So. This is literally how I came to grudgingly accept and then grow to like the c-word. It has a nice pragmatic, somewhat dirty but not gross slant to it rather like 'cock' does for the gentlemen. Again, I realize coding is a thing and not everyone feels the same way, but as far as I can reason, the problem with the greatest insult we can call anyone being a reference to biologically female genitals goes way deeper than whatever specific word we use. So I'm choosing to reclaim this one.

Moving on.

Most of Jason's scars are pulled out of my head and nowhere else, although I'm sure some happen to coincide with events from some of the movies – that's coincidence. The only one that's purposeful is the crazy shoulder scar which is a direct reference to Part 2 and Ginny's not so successful try with the machete.

Also - record POV switches with least amount of time passing because SEX. And I'm ridiculous. The pacing of this was actually really difficult for me. I had a lot of little pieces written out and wanted them staggered so as not to interrupt the flow too much but I'm not sure I succeeded, so this is was a bit of a challenge. Although I still managed to crank the majority of this sucker out pretty damn fast due to a combination of feverish motivation and a weekend quarantined at home instead of being at Comic Con because of the Coronavirus insanity. Worth it? Yeah, actually, kind of.

There's a segment in here that might read as anti-patriarchal feminist preaching, and while I know it's not the first time that's come up in this story, I just wanted to explain. Whitney's perceptions as described there mirror my own very closely. The older I get the more aware I am of this particular stain on the world I live in and the harder it is not to see it or the effects of it. I had an interaction at work not three days ago that falls right into this, because I didn't find a joke from a 60+ year old white man funny and didn't laugh I was therefore labeled as sour with no sense of humor. Intended as abuse? Probably not. But it still was. I don't mean to come across as preachy, but it's also a part of living as female and that includes how relationships and sex are approached. I don't believe in veiling over that, or the importance of it. So it's in here. (Also it's just fucking sexy, ok?)

If you haven't heard it, I strongly suggest you listen to "Body Language" by POESY, the title of which is this chapter's namesake and which I listened to on repeat intermixed with a few other mood-songs. Listen to it and tell me it's not perfection.

Should I up the rating for this fic? I don't fully know where my lines between M and E are…I didn't feel this was quite to that point yet, but maybe I'm wrong? Let me know what you think.

Anyway, I hope the dam-breaking was worth the wait. I'm both exhausted and relieved, and eager to keep going. I will warn you though, I have a feeling the next chapter might be a bit of a wait. I've attempted tackling some of it already and it's proving difficult. So please be patient!

And on that note, I thank you all for reading, for your sweet and delightful comments (comments give me LIFE) and kudos and love. I adore you. Thank you. 3

Until next time!