A/N: Mild Sexual Content. If you have issues with underage sex or sexual content in general, read no further. Please heed this note.
The heat rises. The heat rises. The heat rises and rises and rises and rises until the thighs of the desert quiver and flame licks high up their sandy curves and delves deep inside and moans from within the fleshly core of the world he strokes.
Gaara never cares how hot the sand burns – he still sinks his fingers in the hot-hot-mass and touches, touches, touches. The soft parts of his hands become red-hot and scorched. It doesn't matter. She is willing; she whispers; she touches.
Touch is the chamber of torture; touch is the promise of death. Touch is being fearless; touch is the cruelest sense, never given without a price to pay, always shapeshifting into something other than its nature.
Touch is never touch for Gaara.
Chapter Seven
Gaara steps into the office prepared for his use henceforth. Light filters through the vitreous glass of the window, washes over him, bright gold purified into luminosity. He feels naked and newborn, as if he's seeing the sun for the first time.
The room is stripped bare, merely one desk and one chair, and he supposes it's that way because they don't know what he prefers – but that's exactly what he wants. It won't remain as is for long anyway. Kankurō will insist on adding pictures and bizarre, colorful paintings; Temari will bring flowers and pretty, glittering things; Baki will bedeck the walls with weaponry and exotic, animal skins.
A knock comes after he sits, soft tapping of knuckles. Instinct precedes conscious thought, ingrained too deep to be overcome. The door is being slid open and sand coils around the woman's calves, thighs, waist, chest, neck. Gaara stills. For a moment, he expects screaming, horror, flailing, disgust, running.
A gasp echoes, and she shivers. Nothing more, nothing less. Sand uncoils, and she walks inside. Gaara studies her closely, slowly. Her face is small and unpainted but for the redness of her lips. Her age shows in the fulvous chestnut of her eyes, the sway of her full hips, that flutter of thick lashes, that curling of red-red-lips. Perhaps ten years older than him, perhaps less.
"Kazekage-sama." Her voice is low notes and huskiness, as if she likes the sound her own throat makes, and how she speaks his title is a lick of mellifluence. "I'm called Rami, and I've been assigned to the Kazekage's Office for the past five years."
"Rami." He tastes the name. Raw honey, viscous, sweetly addictive. It suits her, like the color of her hair, the color of his sand.
"Yes." A smile arches and thins those cherry lips. "I mainly deal with secretarial and administrative tasks."
It draws his eyes, his mind. The gasp that has spilled past them – he wants to hear it again, now.
"I see." Gaara sees nothing beyond the memory of that sound.
Her smile arches higher, thins her lips more. "If you need anything, please don't hesitate to call me."
Something in the way she says this drags his eyes away from her lips and up – up into hers. Fire liquefies in the glazed mirror of her eyes, crawls over him, dark gold melted into heat. It's not what lurks there that sizzles but what doesn't.
He sees no fear in her eyes.
Two weeks pass. She brings his green tea every morning. It's hot and slightly bitter and just the way he likes it.
Four weeks pass. She puts a small cactus on the sill of his window. It blooms into a single flower smeared with the essence of waiting and decadence. Its petals glisten deep carmine and its eye simmers dark gold.
Two months pass. She is polite but still rejects his brother. It's the fourth and last time Kankurō tries and the first time Gaara tastes the burn of sake. He drinks with his brother and listens to Kankurō's monologue. It is nothing but a slurred ribbon of words that winds around Gaara's mind only to unwind in the morning. Kankurō grins and casually pats his back as if to say that it's Gaara's time to try now. Nothing escapes that grin.
Four months pass. She is forty minutes late to show for work. It's unprecedented and worrisome and he doesn't like it. The tang of blood and salt-sweat clings to her skin when she comes, makes her lips redder, darker. She only smiles and says nothing. Gaara follows the trail of the blood-scent back to its origin. A man lies on his back, ripped and groaning, hidden in the shade of a narrow alley. Gaara knows his kind – yellow teeth and breath putrid, the stench of filth-lust, something that is less than animal, nothing more than organic waste. He kills him slowly, agonizingly.
Four months and two weeks pass. She circles his desk and bends to place a few scrolls on its right edge. Her neckline dips low but not low enough. Fabric stretches over the swell of her breasts and her scent wafts in the space between them. She smells of pomegranate seeds, something sweet-tart and intoxicating. His fingers are wrapping around her wrist, dragging her closer and over his lap – there is that gasp he has fantasized over and over in his sleepless sleep for months to no end. It's everything he remembers and more.
Her weight settles on him but merely that. Gaara pulls her against him and breathes her in. Skin on skin, fire and woman. He rubs the hollow of her neck with his thumb, feels the pounding pulse as it slows and speeds, wants to feel it beating on his tongue. More sounds come when he takes her throat between his teeth, draws blood to the surface and licks without spilling. The only thing that spills is gasps and slick urgency as she shifts her thighs and guides his hand between them. Wetness soaks his fingers – he moves them maddeningly slow, back and forth, against and inside. She arches and twists and moans the more they tease, the harder they press, the deeper they sink.
Soon it becomes too much and her sounds fragment into syllables.
"Kaze-kage-sa-"
He likes the voice that makes those sounds but not the sounds themselves. Teeth nibble her lips and pry them open. His tongue fills her mouth with his name. Once, twice, and again – until his name maps the inside of her mouth, tangles with her tongue, snakes down her throat. It comes rushing back husky and wet and becomes too much for him then. Gaara licks his name off her red-red-lips and lifts her on his desk.
She is soft and willing and weighs nothing when he lifts her. Has anyone ever been soft and willing for him? Has anything ever weighted nothing? No…no. But now, with her…yes, yes.
Slim fingers fumble with his sash and he lets her – lets her undress him, touch him, feel him. Until that too, becomes too much. Her hands are warm and stroking his neck, fingers splaying, pulling him in for another kiss. Gaara sucks the honey off her tongue, and enters her. Flesh swollen, soft tissue being stretched around him, dripping hot and tightness. He hisses at the flex of gripping muscle, or perhaps that is the hiss of sand on skin. His knuckles curl and nails bite into wood. Sand rakes down his spine, mixed with sweat and searing the expanse of his back. He burns all over, inside out.
One twist of hips, deeper, hotter, more tightness, more sounds. She is a writhing mass of half-moans and half-mewls, knees bending and locking around his waist. Closer. Closer. His head dips and tongue and teeth drag over one nipple, teasing it into an even harder peak. His name then, and spasms, constriction, nerves screaming with flares of white-hot flame. Each thrust wrings out one prolonged moan of his name. She is falling apart and throwing him into a vortex of sensitivity. Pleasure grows and grows and erupts in shocks of electric heat – heat spilling inside.
Gaara is kissing her and she is coiling around him with slick-soft thighs and arms. He lets her – lets her even though his back seethes with raw sensations and he can feel blood trickling down the line of his spine. He doesn't care. He doesn't care. He doesn't care. He doesn't…he laughs – and takes her again. And again.