He sat down.

The throne was cold.

He kept his eyes closed.

## The Bedroom

His eyes opened in the dark.

The ceiling of the bedroom was above him, ordinary and silent, and the weight against both his sides was warm and soft and breathing.

He lay still for one full second, orienting.

His right hand was resting over Jenny’s breast, fingers slightly curled, the weight of it pressing the soft flesh upward gently with her every exhale.

Vivienne’s ringed nipple grazed his ribs.

Both women were deep asleep.

He moved his hand off Jenny slowly, sat up, and the mattress shifted with the redistribution of his weight.

Neither woman stirred.

He turned himself sideways and lay back beside them, flat on his back, one arm folded behind his head, staring at the ceiling.

He pressed his other hand over his eyes.

"Shit." The word came out in a long, low exhale. "That was weird."

The dark room absorbed it without comment.

He lay there for a moment.

Just breathing.

’It always feels like shit at first.’ ’You don’t know what to do with it, and then you remember there’s nothing to do with it, and then that settles.’

His eyes slid sideways without his direction.

Jenny.

Lying on her back, legs slightly parted, hair fanned out in a dark mess around her head. The sheet had slipped off her entirely at some point, leaving her bare from the neck down, the gentle rise and fall of her chest slow and deep.

She was completely unconscious.

Her lips were parted. Small sounds escaping them with each exhale. Not quite snoring. The particular soft rhythm of someone in the deepest possible sleep their body can manage.

He watched her for a moment.

’The reason I keep coming back to this.’ ’Not her body, not the noise she makes, not the way she breaks apart.’

’It makes the other thing quiet.’

’Two hours of destroying something that wants to be destroyed and I don’t think about what I couldn’t hold together fifteen years ago. Simple math.’

His eyes moved to the bedside table.

A small book sat there, bent-spined, half-read, placed there at some point in the past few days by someone who lived in this house before this night happened to it.

He picked it up without reading it.

Set it down.

His hand moved on its own, reaching beside the book, and his fingers closed around a small, pale scrap of fabric.

Jenny’s underwear. Cotton. Left there from earlier.

He turned it in his hand once.

He moved slowly.

Stood from the bed without the mattress making a sound, because he knew how to stand from a mattress, and moved to Jenny’s side.

Her legs were already slightly parted.

He reached down and spread them wider, one hand under each knee, moving them apart with the practiced steadiness of a man rearranging objects, and she stirred slightly, a small sound in her sleep, and then settled back.

He took the underwear.

Folded it once.

And began tucking it into her parted lips with patient fingers until it sat there fully, a soft gag that her sleeping jaw closed around without resistance.

She snored once, adjusted, and went still again.

He stood over her.

His cock was completely soft between his thighs. He looked down at it without expression. Then he pressed two fingers flat to the inside of his own wrist.

The warmth moved through him like a current, not dramatic, just a line of heat that ran upward from his palm and into his chest and down, and his cock filled and hardened in one slow, steady motion until it stood fully erect, veined and thick, pointing forward at the dark bedroom.

Healing ability. Different application.

He lowered himself over her.

Both her wrists in one hand, lifted above her head, fingers laced through his and pinned to the pillow while his other hand guided himself to her entrance.

She was still wet from earlier.

Still faintly open.

He pressed the head against her and began to push in with the same deliberate, unhurried slowness of the beginning. Her body took the first inch, then the second, yielding in sleep with none of the resistance of waking, soft and warm and entirely unaware.

Third inch.

Fourth.

Her breath changed rhythm slightly, the sleep-sounds shifting, a small wrinkle forming between her brows.

He kept pushing.

The moment his cockhead pressed against her cervix, her eyes opened.

Not gradually.

All the way.

Wide and instant, the white showing fully around the iris, a sharp full-body flinch as the deep pressure registered directly in her brainstem before her consciousness had even assembled enough to understand where she was.

She tried to scream.

The underwear absorbed it into a muffled, frantic moan.

Her hips bucked upward reflexively, which drove him deeper by half an inch before her body realised that was the wrong direction and tried to push backward.

"—MMMPH~!! NNGHH~!!"

Her eyes found his face above her.

Both her hands were locked above her head, his fingers threaded through hers, the full weight of his forearm pinning them to the pillow without effort.

His lips were close to her jaw.

"Shut up," he said quietly.

Not a whisper. Not loud. The particular low register that carries without volume.

"Or your mother wakes up."

Jenny’s eyes moved.

Sideways.

To the other side of the bed.

Vivienne lay less than two feet away, on her back, both new rings glinting faintly in the dark, her chest rising and falling in deep, even rhythm. Her lashes lay still against her cheeks.

And then Vivienne’s left eye twitched.

The lid pressed tight for a moment. A micro-expression, a small flicker of muscle below the surface, the specific movement of a person in light sleep processing something close to waking.

Jenny’s face went still.

Her eyes went back to his face above her.

Her mouth moved around the gag, the fabric pressing her lips outward slightly, and the sounds that came through were broken and wet and voiceless.

’No.’ ’No, she’s right there.’ ’She is literally right there and she is almost awake and he is inside me to the—’

His hips rolled.

One slow, complete withdrawal to the tip and back to the hilt, pressing her cervix again at the end of the push with a heaviness that made her back arch off the mattress involuntarily.

"MMMPH~!! NGH~!!"

’Stop.’ ’Stop ’stop’ ’stop’—’

Vivienne’s fingers moved on the sheet.

Jenny watched them.

Three inches away from her own thigh, Vivienne’s fingers curled and released once, slowly, in the way sleeping hands do when the body is drifting upward through layers.

Jenny’s entire body went rigid.

Not from the cock inside her.

From the person beside her.

He leaned down close to the shell of her ear.

His breath was warm and even.

"Don’t make a sound," he said. "And she’ll go back down."

His hips moved again.

Slow. Deliberate. A long drag out and a long, even push back in, filling her fully, the fat head pressing against her deepest point with the precision of something that knew exactly where it was going.

"MMMPH~!!"

She bit down on the fabric.

’She is going to wake up.’ ’If I make a sound she will wake up and look over and see me with his cock inside me and his hands on my wrists and—’