"...yeah." I nod.
"Mm. Good. Good."
He pulls me up.
He walks me three steps to the bed and tips me forward onto it. Doesn't help me up. Just lets gravity put my chest against his duvet and my knees against the mattress edge, and the position—face down, ass up—pulls a sound out of me. The soreness from two nights ago flares hot. My body remembers. Atlas put me in this exact position. Atlas's hand at the back of my neck. Atlas's voice in my ear.
Zero behind me notices the way my body has settled into it. He hums.
"Yeah. Look at you. You know what you're doing here."
He spreads my ass cheeks his hands.
The cool air hits where I am still—
—a little raw.
He stops.
The silence behind me is total. I can’t see his face, but I can feel his thumbs at the cleft of my ass, holding me open, and the slow weight of his attention on what he is looking at. My breath catches. I bury my face in the duvet.
"...oh,baby."
His voice has gone different. Reverent and dark in the same breath.
"You’re still red from my brother."
He drags his thumb, slow, over my rim.
I yelp.
It’s small and humiliating and entirely involuntary, and it makes Zero respond—half a laugh, half a groan, the sound of a man finding more than he came looking for.
"Aww,” he coos at me. “That tender, baby?"
"...Zero—"
"Yes or no?"
"...yes—"
"Good."
He drags his thumb again. Slower this time. Watching, I can feel him watching, the way he watches me wince and clench and try to push back into him anyway because I am so far gone–driving mad by how bad I want him inside me–I can’t help it.
"Look at you. So fucked out for me already and I haven't even started."
"Zero, please—"
"Please what?"
"...don't–don’t be gentle."
His thumb stops.
The silence behind me is one full second long.
Then he laughs—soft, wrecked, almost disbelieving—and presses the pad of his thumb against my rim and circles it, slow, on the still-raw place where I am still puffy from being held open and fucked raw for hours two nights ago. The sound I make into the duvet is feral. I feel the wince in my hips. I feel my body clench against the ache and then open against the want, both at once, and Zero is reading every twitch.
