Hotel Marseta. Room 412.

The hallway of the fourth floor had the specific, hushed quality of expensive hotels at this hour — the thick carpet absorbing footsteps, the walls close enough together that sounds carried, the air conditioning doing its steady, neutral work of making the space feel uninhabited regardless of what was happening in it.

Yuna stood outside Room 412.

She had been standing outside Room 412 for forty seconds, which was how long it had taken to travel from the elevator to this door, and she had spent those forty seconds doing the mental arithmetic of whether showing up at this specific room was the correct decision.

The arithmetic kept coming out the same.

She knocked.

What happened next happened quickly.

The door opened.

A hand.

Not a welcome — a ’grip’, fingers closing around her arm with the unhurried certainty of someone who had been expecting her and had decided how arrivals would be handled — and she was pulled forward off her feet, her body meeting the doorframe on the way through, the impact jiggling the full weight of her chest against the wood before she cleared it, and then she was inside.

The lights were off.

Her back hit something warm and solid and she gasped — the instinctive, full-body gasp of a person whose momentum has been stopped — and her hands came up and found the surface she had hit.

Bare skin.

Solid.

The specific, hard architecture of a chest that belonged to someone who did not carry an ounce of anything that wasn’t load-bearing.

"WHO ARE—"

The lights came on.

She looked up.

Purple eyes.

Black hair pushed carelessly away from a face she had known in a different context — the context of a man who had arrived in her life fourteen months ago wearing the clean, formal attire of the world she had been summoned into, who had looked at her with those eyes and said things that had rewired her in ways she was still discovering.

The face was different here.

Casual. Present in the specific way he was present when he had decided to be somewhere rather than appearing to be. A jaw she could see properly without the court framing. The spotless skin. The particular quality of his attention when it was aimed directly at her rather than at a room.

"Raven."

She said it like a breath.

"Welcome, Yuna," he said, warm and unhurried. "How are you."

She stopped thinking about the door and the darkness and the grip.

Her arms moved.

Both of them, going around him before she had finished the decision — her face finding the space below his collarbone, her cheek pressing against the warmth of his bare chest, the sound of his heartbeat arriving through the skin she was pressed against with the calm, steady reliability of something that had never been in a hurry.

He was completely naked.

She felt this register through her own clothes — the bare skin of his torso against her face, the absence of fabric everywhere her hands were finding as they moved, the specific warmth of a body that had been generating heat in an enclosed space and was now in contact with something cooler.

His hand moved. 𝗳𝚛𝗲𝕖𝚠𝚎𝚋𝗻𝗼𝕧𝗲𝐥.𝚌𝚘𝐦

Down her back.

Past the waist.

Finding the curve of her ass through her jeans — the full, generous weight of it, the thick softness that he had commented on in the direct, clinical way he commented on things that interested him, and had spent subsequent time educating — and he palmed it, the grip easy and certain, pulling the weight upward slightly.

She made a sound into his chest.

"Hngh~"

Not a protest.

The involuntary, helpless sound of a body that has been conditioned to respond to a stimulus and is doing so with the faithful accuracy of something well-trained.

"Raven—" Her voice muffled against his skin. "I missed—"

She felt his cock against her.

Through her jeans. Heavy. Not fully hard yet but ’present’, the thick, substantial hang of it against the fabric — the length of it against her hip as she pressed into him, the specific, dimensional fact of something her body had been introduced to and had not stopped thinking about.

Her hips moved.

A small, grinding shift — her own motion, her own body’s initiative — pressing herself against the solid warmth of him, her breasts catching friction against his chest through her clothes, the nipple that he had pulled her through the door by now rubbing against the fabric of her own shirt in a way that was producing information she was not managing well.

"I’ve been here for two days," she said into his chest, the words coming out with the slightly breathless quality of a person doing two things at once. "Securing the woman you asked for. And you didn’t — you left me here without—"

"You were two hours late," he said.

"I was—"

"Two hours late."

She pulled her face back enough to look up at him.

The expression on his face was the expression it always was — the warm, certain, slightly amused look of a man who has arranged things and is watching them proceed according to arrangement — and she wanted to be annoyed at it and was not, because his hand was still on her ass and his cock was at her hip and the wanting had overruled the annoyed approximately thirty seconds ago.

"I love you," she said.

The words arrived before she had audited them, direct and unguarded in the way her feelings about him were always direct and unguarded in the moments when she was this close to him.

"I love you so much—"

A sound.

From the bed.

Muffled. The compressed, involuntary sound of someone producing noise through an obstruction — the specific quality of a voice working against something stuffed in its mouth.

Yuna went still.

She turned her head.

Through the space between his shoulder and his arm — the frame his body made when she was pressed against him — she saw the bed.

And on the bed:

An ass.

A Thick one.