The pattern continues like that for two more fucking weeks. On Friday, Zuko rents a car with a spacious backseat and tries to drive them out of the city to somewhere more secluded. Less than ten minutes after they get on the highway, there's a five car pile-up ahead of them, backing up traffic. On Monday, Kyoka books a presidential suite for them, only for them to learn to that their reservation had been lost in the system and the rest of the rooms are sold out ("So sorry, sir but we're overbooked now. There's nothing we can do.").
On Thursday, Zuko finally gets his mouth on Kyoka's in a cab, and it feels like heaven, hand steadily moving up her thigh while she sucks on his tongue. The kiss gets increasingly heated. She climbs half into his lap, and he makes a gutteral sound at the sensation of her body slotting against his, tightening his grip on her hips so he won't try to rip off her clothes. The noise seems to be the last straw, in a long series of dirty looks in the rearview mirror. The cab driver kicks them out, miles away from their hotel, and somehow gets Zuko's wallet in the exchange, leaving them stranded.
He passes his time in between not having sex with Kyoka, thinking about why Kyoka might need to have sex for money. Does she have a terminally ill grandmother? Are her student loans that expensive? Does she have a brother she needs to pay bail on to get out of prison? The wilder the reasons Zuko comes up with, the less he can bring himself to pull out his badge. If she's suffering through something that tragic, she doesn't deserve to have this heaped on top of her as well.
Plus, she's way too pretty to go to jail. People would do terrible things to her on the inside. The only person who should be allowed to do terrible things to Kyoka is Zuko.
::
By the time Zuko looks up in a crowded coffee shop in the city center on a rare day off and catches Kyoka's gaze across a room of plushy sofas, arresting her is furthest thing from his mind. He's on the verse of going insane, only a few days away from taking his gun to the shooting range and firing away all of the fucking sexual tension that's starting to keep him up at night at this point. He has a whole new morning jerk-off routine now, considering how often he's woken up from dreams about finally getting underneath Kyoka's ridiculous clothes and needed to take care of himself.
But now she's wearing normal clothes for once—a blue t-shirt and loose jeans. She looks so much better in them than she ever has in her cheesy late night uniforms. Her hair isn't all primped and flows down her back. There's a scarf around her neck. She's setting down a steaming coffee thermos so that she can tear a pack of sugar with her teeth and drop it into her drink. Zuko is ridiculously charmed by that little detail—the fact that even hookers care enough about the environment to carry their own thermoses with them. Kyoka looks normal—like someone Zuko can have; like someone he could take home and introduce to his mom. The whole scene makes his breath catch.
Right away, her eyes go wide with recognition, a breathtaking shade of blue. Coffee mug forgotten by her elbow, she tugs her bottom lip between her teeth in a self-conscious motion that goes straight to Zuko's dick. His feet carry him across the room on autopilot. He's a piece of scrap metal, drawn irresistibly to a magnet. Kyoka helps close the distance, coming around the counter. In only a few seconds, Zuko is in arm's reach.
"My apartment is a one minute walk away," he tells her, breathing a little hard in anticipation. "There was no construction; no fires; no traffic jams; nothing at all wrong, three minutes ago when I walked over here. I can't think of anything that would get in our way. Please come home with me."
Kyoka is breathing hard too, chest rising and falling in time with Zuko's, and lips bitten red.
"Yes," she says, fervently.
::
The very moment they get inside Zuko's apartment, he pushes Kyoka back against the wall and kisses her hard, hands clenched in her scarf. She tastes like the coffee she'd abandoned back in the store, and she looks incredible, curls windswept and cheeks gone pink from the cold. She kisses back with equal fervor, like she's been wanting this as much as he has. That's gratifying.
When Zuko's neck starts to crick (he hadn't put much thought before into how much taller he was than her, but now he knows he's going to be thinking about it constantly), he lifts her in one push, using the leverage of the wall. She goes with it, wrapping her legs around his waist and hooking her arms around the back of his head. In that position, it's all too easy for Zuko to press into her body and keep her there, electricity sparking up each time one of them dives back into the kiss.
"Fuck, sugar," Kyoka says. "Holy fuck, you're so fucking hot. Your fucking arms."
"You too," Zuko says, scraping his teeth along the underside of her jaw. "I've been thinking about you for weeks."
She fits perfectly in his arms, like the second half of a puzzle piece. She's already rumpled-looking, sounding like her ability to think is fraying more with every kiss they share. Zuko wants take advantage of that—wants to erase every other client Kyoka has ever had from her mind. He's determined to be the best fuck that she has ever had.
"You're gorgeous," he continues, unable to stop the stream coming out of his mouth. "Kyoka, God, your mouth. I want your lips on my cock. I want to taste my come on your tongue. I want to—"
He stops, ribs constricting, as he notices the almost imperceptible flinch in her face. If he wasn't trained to conduct interrogations, he might've missed it, but with all the experience he's had, it might as well be a blinking neon light that he's crossed a line. This is why he shouldn't be on this assignment! He's so far from capable of dealing with hookers, that literally anyone else in the entire precinct could have done a better job than he is. The fact that he's starting to think he'd be okay with getting fired, if he could only get an orgasm out of it, is a clear sign of his ineptitude.
"Shit," Zuko says quickly, loosening his grip on her. "Did I say something wrong? I don't know what I… I mean, you have to tell me your boundaries."
"You didn't," Kyoka replies, equally fast.
"I did," he protests, concerned. "I said something you didn't like."
Kyoka pauses, studying him, and then rocks her hips in a slow lazy motion. She starts to smile again when he can't hold back a grunt at the spark that friction causes. Zuko gets momentarily mesmerized watching as her pupils go darker. "I can assure you, sugar, that I like everything you're doing."
"You promise?" he pants, holding back from another kiss. Fuck, his cock is throbbing. He wants his hands on her skin.
She rolls his eyes, but looks kind of pleased, at the same time. "I promise, Prince Charming."
He caves and kisses her, even though he knows he's being made fun of, feeling her hands drop to the buttons of his jeans. He sucks in his stomach, helpfully, giving her more room to free his cock from his boxers. At the same time he takes a hand off the wall and slides it up her stomach under her shirt, feeling nothing but smooth muscle and then the edge of her bra. Apparently, being a hooker calls for a lot of gym time. Zuko thinks Kyoka is in better shape than he is.
In the corner of his eye when he comes up for a breath from a particularly heated stretch of kisses where Kyoka started to stroke the shaft of his cock with deft fingers, he catches sight of his badge, sitting face up on a side table and taunting him. Fuck, fuck, fuck. This isn't what he's supposed to be doing. If he doesn't have the stomach to arrest Kyoka, he should at least tell her the truth; give her the chance to get away.
"Wait," he gasps, arching up on his toes. She presses her thumb into the head of his dick, dragging another string of sounds out of him. "But…" he groans, trying to bat her hand away. "We haven't agreed on…"
He trails off, too distracted to care, because she's pushed his jeans down far enough to start to work his shaft in earnest.
"I don't care," she says, legs a vice-like clamp around his ass. "I just want to blow you. Do whatever; buy me a fucking pizza."
Zuko barely hears the question, about to come all over his clothes. "Okay," he says, yanking at her scarf and throwing it off to the side.
Kyoka punches him lightly in the shoulder so Zuko will put her down, and then drops to her knees, right there in the hallway. She gives him one of the most spectacular blowjobs that he's ever had in his life—sucking lightly on his balls, while her wrist works from head to base—and it's so good that Zuko almost manages to entirely suppress the stab of jealousy he feels thinking about how she got to be so good.
He insists on returning the favor, even though it's probably not how her transactions normally go. Regardless, Kyoka doesn't put up much of a fight. Considering how pink her cheeks get when she's close to coming—how rich the sounds are, spilling from her lips—Zuko doesn't understand why everyone wouldn't want to get her off.
"Do you want me to go?" Kyoka asks uncertainly, still slumped against the wall with her jeans pulled haphazardly down her thighs while Zuko's wiping his mouth with the back of his hand and hoping the room will stop spinning eventually.
"No, no," he says, stuffing his badge under his pile of mail in a quick, hopefully subtle movement. He wants her to never, ever, leave his apartment again. If only he could put her in cuffs for that. Or even for other fun, bed-related reasons. "I owe you pizza. You should hang out."
"Uh…," Kyoka says, seeming to do some kind of mental calculation before she gives up entirely, shrugging. "Okay. That sounds good."
So he orders pizza, and Kyoka curls up close to him on the sofa, and they watch sitcoms together until it arrives. She stays through three episodes and five slices before she insists, "I really do have to go."
Zuko tries very hard not to think about where she has to go off to. He kisses her for a long time at the door, making sure to slip the pizza receipt—with his number carefully written out on the back—into her back pocket.
::
It keeps happening, over and over again. Zuko keeps sending Kyoka tentative texts around 10 or 11 at night, trying to work within her schedule, and she keeps coming over, somehow always miraculously in between clients at the time. He really likes her—thinks she's hilarious, smart as fuck, good in bed, and ridiculously hot, when she's well-dressed and wearing her hair naturally. He can't bring himself to ruin her life by arresting her. He's written it off at work, passing the assignment off to someone else, and hoping that they go to any other hooker in the entire city besides Kyoka. He has reserved himself to the fact that he's going to continue paying her for sex, and he's going to hope to fucking hell that no one in the Department ever finds out about it, because that would be the end of his career as a police officer; right now, at only 26.
Except, the thing is, he's not sure that he's actually paid her for sex; not in a way that counts. They've fall into this weird bartering pattern, just shy of illegal. He'd fingered her, mostly paying attention to her clit, because she seemed to really like the slide of his fingers there more than anything else. She came again while they were having sex, and after she only said, "Order some Thai, okay?" She had given him another spectacular blowjob, and then just asked, "Grab me a beer from the fridge."
The first time she slept over, accidentally falling asleep after Zuko ate her out until there were tears leaking out of the corner of her eyes, he'd been nervous that that was going to be the straw that broke the camel's back—that for some reason she was going to turn around and demand compensation for all the other meetings she'd missed that night. Instead, she had only smiled at him across the pillows the next morning, half of her face illuminated by a beam of sun coming in through a window, and asked, "Do you have pancake mix?" She'd even helped him flip them.
He doesn't understand what's going on with them at all, but he doesn't hate it at all.