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Thorn was sobbing into her stomach. His claws were calm, but she reached toward him warily nonetheless. Slowly, gently, Ophelia touched his face, his tears.
He turned away. “No,” he said. “Don’t.”
Ophelia frowned, but moved her hand from his face as he buried his head further in her shirt. She’d never seen him even remotely like this before: his usual control was shattered.
“Thorn?” Something within her ached. She felt, deeply, that his accidental use of his claws on Second wasn’t really his fault – a forgivable act that didn’t speak to his fundamental nature. But (as ever) the words caught in her throat. How could she express something so unalienable but also so alien to him? She thought again of how he looked at himself in the mirror. She reached to lightly touch his shoulder.
Thorn immediately shrugged her off. “No.” He looked up at her. It was such a novelty to have his eyes below hers, to not have to crane her neck to meet his gaze. “Don’t be kind to me,” he said. He was still shaking – she could feel his body trembling against hers – but his eyes were clear.
Ophelia hovered her hands in the air behind his head, completely lost. “Do you … want me to leave you alone?”
“No!” Thorn still held her close. “No. I ask that you treat me how I deserve.”
She still didn’t know where to put her hands. “I have no desire to be cruel to you, Thorn.”
He shook his head, the smallest movement. “It would help, if you would –” he paused, gathered himself. “– punish me.”
Ophelia blinked. Punish him? She looked down into his steely eyes, puffy from crying. At the distress there, beneath his usual cold control. Would it help? What was she even supposed to do? She couldn’t take away his toys as you would with a child. Was she supposed to assign him extra chores? …hurt him?
Tentatively, she reached for Thorn’s white-blond hair. He didn’t stop her this time, but continued to look up as she nestled her fingers in the strands and, hesitantly, tugged.
The response was immediate. Thorn groaned and closed his eyes, leaning toward her to increase the tension between her hand and his scalp. She pulled harder, gaining confidence, and his head moved back away from her, following her hand.
Ophelia looked down at Thorn, kneeling at her feet, face wet with tears and contorted in an expression she’d never seen on him before. His hands still clutched at her. His uniform was still spotted with blood. His trousers visibly strained against the hardness of his erection.
Oh, well. That was … unexpected. She considered him again. His hair, unkempt from her ministrations. His unusually rumpled clothes. The desperation in how he held her.
Ophelia felt something squirm in her gut. She pulled on Thorn's collar with the hand that wasn't still in his hair, undoing the top few buttons so she could run her fingers along the sweat that was collecting along his sharp collarbones. She'd spent so much of the past few days, weeks, years – her whole life, even – being told what to do, how to feel, how to act. She'd spent so long being scared of being with Thorn, of doing something wrong, of not being desirable.
She tipped his chin up toward her, ran her nails along his jaw to his lips. He opened his eyes, breathing hard, then opened his mouth to her. There was shame there, that look she’d seen when he’d last offered her time for them to be together. She ran her fingers along the sharp ridges of his teeth. She felt she could spend hours (her whole life, even) just touching him, trying to memorize every jagged angle of his spidery body.
“I don't think you deserve to be punished," Ophelia said, fingers still in Thorn's mouth. "But I will help you with this. You must tell me if there's anything specific you need or anything that doesn't suit you, alright?”
He nodded sharply, looking directly into her eyes. Shame, but also decisiveness. Okay. She would take him at his word. He wanted this. She could do this. Assignment of chores, denial of toys. Pain.
Ophelia detached herself from Thorn. With only a little difficulty, she perched herself on the large desk that stood to one side of the room and pulled down her bottoms.
“Come here,” she said, pointing to the floor beneath her dangling feet. He didn't bother standing – in only one motion, he'd moved his long body across the room. He knelt before her, tense as a tightrope. She looked down at him, still enjoying the novelty of the angle. She knew she should be embarrassed, sitting half-naked on a stranger's furniture. But if Thorn needed to be given tasks to somehow atone for his mistakes, she knew what she wanted him to do. “Use your mouth, please.”
Ophelia suspected that this wasn't Thorn's favorite sexual act, but he approached it with enthusiasm. He immediately found her clit and licked against it. Ophelia bit her lip and resisted the urge to press up into Thorn for more pressure. Wait, no – pain, she reminded herself – she tangled her ungloved hands in his mussed hair and pushed his head hard against her cunt. She immediately regretted it, waiting for the gash of his claws in her flesh. But the noise Thorn emitted – a low keening, almost a whine – and the way his hands came up to grip her thighs made her think that she’d done something very right.
Thorn’s memory and mathematical precision ensured that he catalogued her reaction to every motion he made and, even in their limited time together, he’d learned exactly how to bring Ophelia to the brink. A flick this way, a particular rhythm, sucking here and there, a brief pause. Hard pressure against his flattened tongue. She tried to guide his head but truly he needed no further instruction and soon she had to move her hands to hold herself on the desk. The narrow bones of his fingers dug into the soft flesh of her ass as he devoured her orgasm, leaving her limp and gasping, clutching at the edge of the desk and Thorn’s forearms.
She caught her breath, vision refocusing on Thorn still nestled deep between her thighs. He was holding himself still, but there was a small wet patch at the front of his tented trousers. His fingers twitched and harsh breath tickled her thighs. His eyes turned up toward hers, ever so briefly, before closing. It was just a moment, but Ophelia caught the desperation lingering in his usually steady gaze.
“Another, please,” she said, still breathy. “Your hands this time.”
Thorn needed no encouragement. He sat up straighter, one hand holding the small of her back and the other going to her cunt. She was wet and loose from her orgasm and he immediately slipped two fingers inside her, twisting as he found exactly the right places to rub.
She loved his hands. Ophelia enjoyed most everything about this lanky creature of a man, but his fingers where long and dextrous in ways hers were not and could hit something deep inside her that nothing else could. She loved feeling full of him like this.
Ophelia squirmed and reached for his face, still damp with her fluids. She swiped her thumb across his chin, none too gently, and put it to his lips. He met her eyes as he sucked lightly on her fingers. Again and again she did this until his face was – well, not clean exactly, but a little tidier.
Thorns eyes held hers as he moved his thumb up to Ophelia’s clit, index and middle fingers still deep inside her. She couldn’t help but cry out and would have fallen backward if it weren’t for his stabilizing hand on her back. Her hands searched for something to grasp and she once again found his hair as he took her apart yet again, her hands tugging, his hands just where she needed them. Her whole body pulsed with the orgasm, her mind going blank and her limbs losing sensation on Thorn’s fingers. Thorn’s ugly, wonderful, perfect fingers.
It took her a long moment to come back to herself. Thorn had extricated himself from her and was holding his hands in front of him, eyes open but a little clouded. His whole body was a line of tension, as if keeping himself still was a monumental effort.
Ophelia leaned forward and gently caressed Thorn’s face. “Enough?” she asked, softly.
He jerked his head to one side then the other. No, not enough.
Ophelia considered her options. Her body was well and truly wrung out – the lack of sleep and inadequate food had left her exhausted.
She waved to the hand that had just been inside her and tapped Thorn’s mouth. “Clean up this mess, please.” She was a little surprised at how willingly he obeyed: she didn’t think his compulsive need for hygiene wouldn’t normally have allowed such an act. But obey he did, and with a thoroughness that impressed her.
Ophelia watched for a moment, entranced, then shifted to the side and hopped off the desk to retrieve her discarded clothing. She fumbled with the buttons for far too long and when she looked back up Thorn was watching her with that cloudy haze over his eyes.
“Your turn,” she said, tugging on his collar. Thorn slowly unbuttoned his uniform coat and his shirt, folding them neatly as he went. He brought his legs up from kneeling to remove his leg brace and slip off his shoes. Ophelia thought that he must have been in horrible pain from having been still in that position for so long, but if he was he didn’t show it. He looked up at her as he fingered at the fastening on his trousers, and she nodded. He stood to pull off his remaining clothing, then returned to kneeling at her feet, helping his bad leg along with one hand.
He was shaking. Ophelia could see the tremble in his hands and the line of his mouth as his cock twitched and leaked. She couldn’t resist – she leaned over to kiss him. She’d had some vague intention of it being gentle, maybe, or reassuring, but Thorn kissed into her with such intensity that it immediately turned rough and deep and left them both breathless.
Pulling away, she led Thorn to a sofa that nestled between the cabinets and bookshelves on the other side of the room. It’s a good thing there aren’t any actual directors, she mused. They might not take kindly to their furniture being used such. (She desperately hoped that no other ungloved Readers ever entered this room.) She positioned her skeleton of a husband so his head was propped against one armrest and the rest of his body lay across the seat cushions. She drew herself up between his legs so they folded around her.
It was not a dignified position. A blotchy flush spread from his face down his chest, making the pale hair and scars there more visible than usual. Ophelia ran her hand over Thorn's cock where it jutted up against his stomach in front of her and he arched into it, head falling back against the armrest.
Denial, she reminded herself. “Don’t finish,” she said, drawing her hand away as she fumbled her uncoordinated fingers. She looked at his long neck, the way his face was again contorted in that unrecognizable expression, and added, face hot, “You’ll come when you’ve earned it.”
Thorn gasped and thrust up at that as if Ophelia was stroking him. She wasn’t – she feared that she would injure him in earnest if she continued to try to handle such a delicate part of him with her own body as disconnected as it was. It was infuriating.
“Touch yourself,” she instructed, giving in to her limitations.
As Thorn wrapped a hand around his twitching cock, Ophelia felt that this would probably be a good opportunity to cause him pain beyond just a tug on the hair. She imagined slapping him, contorting his limbs, bruising his skin, and felt sick. She had no desire to actually hurt him, regardless of what he might want. Instead, she leaned forward to run her nails along his torso. They were short, bitten down in the absence of a glove seam to chew on, but Thorn shuddered regardless. Her fingers caught on the hair on his chest, on the slightly raised skin of his larger scars, on his nipples. She paused there, pinching each nipple in turn, before returning to scraping her nails down his sides. Thorn was no longer trying to hold himself still as he had when he’d been kneeling before her. He squirmed and thrust into his fist, stopping periodically to gasp and squeeze the base of his cock. Ophelia thought he must have been right near the edge for a while now. He did always enjoy pleasuring her.
Ophelia scratched her way down past Thorn’s hips and onto his thighs, back up to his groin. She tugged lightly on the hair below his navel, brushed her fingertips across the sensitive skin behind his balls.
He was saying something, now, soft between his cries and groans. Ophelia leaned in to hear better.
“Please, please,” he was begging. “Please.”
“What do you want?” she asked. She ran her fingers up the insides of his thighs.
Thorn just shook his head, trembling, hand still alternately stroking and stopping on his cock.
"This?" she rubbed her thumb along the liquid beading at his tip.
Thorn nodded. Ophelia thought she saw a tear leak from the corner of one of his eyes, squeezed tightly shut. She bit down lightly on the soft skin near his groin, and he groaned.
“Do you think you deserve it?”
There was a long pause at this. Thorn’s hand kept moving. Eventually, he nodded.
“Finish, then.”
And he did. It only took a few strokes for Thorn to bring himself to orgasm, his body shaking even more intensely. Ophelia had expected him to cry out, but he was silent as his body was wracked with first the pulses of orgasm as he spent on his stomach and then – she realized, with some alarm – with sobs.
“Oh, Thorn,” she said, climbing off the sofa to bring her face to his on the armrest and gently kiss his tears. “Are you okay? Was that what you wanted?”
He continued to cry, burying his face in her neck. “Thank you,” he said, almost inaudible.
Ophelia brushed his hair away from his face, trying her best to straighten it. As his sobs subsided, she kissed his forehead then went to go find the spare handkerchiefs she knew he carried along with his flask of surgical spirit. He gazed up at her, dazed, as she tentatively wiped his tears and running nose. He seemed to be gradually coming back to himself as she gently cleaned off his stomach and hands, first with a clean handkerchief then with the surgical spirit. With every swipe of the cloth and whiff of the disinfectant, his eyes grew steadily clearer, his flush fading back to his usual pallor. She cleaned the remaining mess off his face and helped guide him so he was sitting more normally on the sofa, and then so, so slowly, helped re-dress him.
Thorn had to intervene a few times to prevent a garment from going on back-to-front, and by the time she was trying to figure out what shoe went on which foot he was back to his normal authoritarian self, all angles and carefully maintained control. He waved her away when she tried to pick up his leg brace and reattached it himself.
Ophelia stood before him, feeling awkward. Was she supposed to talk about it? Pretend it hadn’t happened?
Thorn looked at her, mouth twitching in that typically inscrutable way, and motioned for her to join him on the sofa.
“Thank you,” he said, again. He looked away from Ophelia. His voice was matter-of-fact. “I can’t pretend I’m not – embarrassed. A little more than that, even. But I thank you.”
Ophelia did not pretend to fully understand what had just happened. “Oh, well, I assure you I enjoyed it well enough.”
Thorn laughed at that, a short, small noise. Ophelia savored it like a rare delicacy.
“You did well.” She savored his praise, too. She watched as he drew himself up off the sofa inch by inch, vertebra by vertebra. What a magnificent beast she’d married.
“Alright,” Thorn said. Already the blood and other mess was fading from his clothing, looking closer to neatly washed and pressed than anything Ophelia had ever worn. He checked out his watch and it click-click’ed open on its own, as it had ever since Ophelia had animated it. He held his hand out to her. “We have work to do and not much time remaining to do it. Follow me.”