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The frenzy clears once the sun has dipped under the horizon.
Through the sweat stinging his eyes, Kylo sees the flowers have closed, black petals curled tight. He can’t smell their citric syrup anymore.
He’s afraid to look down.
Rey is panting, breath ragged, beneath him. Her knee is hooked over his elbow, fingers locked at the nape of his neck. He’s still inside her, rapidly softening.
“I couldn’t stop,” he says, emotionless, “I tried.”
He wants her to know, though she must remember how fast he’d moved when he realised the danger. He’d tried to pull their clenched sabers away from the cluster of shrubs, hissed a sharp warning. But she’d shoved him into them, followed with a wild slash that sent an arc of pollen over them both.
He’s dizzy from hours of exertion without food or water. His back is sun-burnt, his shoulders scratched raw. His collarbone hurts where she bit him and his tongue feels numb.
“It’s my fault.” Her voice is hoarse and he finally looks away from the contracted black buds.
There are leaves in the tangle of her hair, dirt on her cheek and shoulder. She is covered in marks shaped like his mouth and his fingers. Her eyes are lowered, almost closed, and Ben didn’t know he could feel an urge this strong, or regret this vicious.
She drags herself from the cage of his body but he can’t move a muscle, not even to cover himself. Rey sits on her knees, winces, shifts to her left, and calls her fallen saber from the pile of their shredded clothing.
He doesn’t call his, though it’s there, by her slick thigh. He stretches his neck to offer her a clean line, and waits.
“There was a lake close-by, wasn’t there?”
The unexpected question lifts his eyes to hers. Her mouth is held tight, one arm covering her breasts.
“I hurt you.” It’s a disgusting, trembling admission but it still sounds like he’s admonishing her for not ending this, for dragging out the remorse-filled close to his life. For giving quarter.
“Neither of us were gentle.” She’s looking at a thin trickle of blood on his bicep, the swell of his lip, bruised as hers are. And she seems dazed. Not enraged. Not repulsed.
He stands and she skitters backwards in the mess of crushed plants, eyes zeroed in on his stance.
“I hurt you,” he says again but this time there’s no tremble. He takes slow half-steps toward her and leans down to lift her from the ground. His torn, burnt skin fires when she lays her forearms along them, and there’s a moment where she looks at him, side-on, and he thinks she will lean her forehead to his cheekbone. He takes a faltering step.
When she doesn’t move, staring over his shoulder with her head held high, he walks them out of the shrubbery. He only knows she’s dropped her saber by the muted thud it makes when it lands on the softened ground behind him. Steadily, he follows the path of charred destruction they’d left in their wake, to the small pool she had spotted. He walks straight into it, up to his thighs, stopping before the cool water can touch her.
“The cold will help,” he says and waits until she nods before he dips them both into it.
His cock stings with overuse and Rey must be in pain because her body tenses and her cheek presses into his neck.
Even now, as he smooths his hand over her back, moves his fingers gently over her thigh to wash their come from her skin, even now he knows he will take this and store it away a precious memory, instead of the worst thing he could have done to her.
He kneels on the sandy lake-bed, sits her on his thighs so he can lay her back into the water with one palm flat in the middle of her spine to hold her afloat. It’s unnaturally quiet on this planet, nothing but plant life on this side, so the tiny sounds she makes as he washes her echo across the surface. Ben has to close his eyes.
He only opens them when her torso and legs are clean. He hovers the span between his forefinger and thumb in an arc under the curve of her breast, watches her until he finds consent in the placid sway of her head in the water, and then sweeps over her chest. Her nipples are still hard.
Another of those tiny moans and her hand lifts out of the water to draw over his bicep and shoulder, cleaning him.
He doesn’t want to. He doesn’t. But Kylo has done this to her. And she must be sore. His hips are throbbing in the cold water so her cunt must be aching and bruised. He’s a fucking animal but he didn’t mean to be. He wouldn’t have, if he’d had a choice.
“I can be gentle,” he says as his thumb runs the top of her thigh, edging close to show her what he wants to do for her.
“You were, sometimes.” Her voice is breathy, the way it was when they clung together in the dirt, waiting for the next wave of craving to hit them.
“I’m sorry.” He says it so quietly a lapping wave could cover the sound and his fingers dip gently between her legs at the same moment, so she won’t see that the words cost him everything he has left.
Without the haze of the pollen, his fingers glide through her like a lucid dream. It can’t be real, how he is touching her, cleaning away the evidence of what he did to her from the swollen lips of her pussy, the cleft of her ass. But it is real, so he is careful and slow.
In the silence that follows, her stomach muscles clench and she pulls herself up with a surge of water that rushes over his chest.
“Now, you.”
She raises handfuls of the lakewater and lets it fall over his chest, his back. Her hands glide, soothing the sting her raked nails had made in his skin. She combs wet fingers through his hair, lifting away the last of the petals. Her hands still smell faintly of his come.
The bite mark is bleeding again and she leans in to examine it. He raises his chin to give her room. Rey’s cool breath blows softly onto the tear and her hands dip under the surface to skim across his stomach. Her fingertips slowly stroke down the hollow dips on either side of his abdominals, then splay over the crease of his thighs.
“I can be gentle too.”
Ben’s nod is so small he’s not sure how she sees it. But her face softens under his stare, an impossible look he has no words for, so he widens his stance and she touches him. She lifts his length with yielding hands, eases his skin back to sweep his head with the barest touch.
He sucks in a breath when she cups him. He’s so tender and raw but she doesn’t hurt him. She smooths lightly over the most vulnerable part of his body. When her hand moves lower, sweeping underneath him, he brings his arm out of the water, cups her jaw, so he can watch her face while she circles his hole with her middle finger.
In the pollen, she’d been rougher, pressing two fingers inside him. He hadn’t had the presence of mind not to growl and suck at her neck. The mark he’d left there is the largest. But now he can breathe, eyes bolted to hers, and despite the cool water and the throbbing sting, his cock stirs.
“Rey.” He leans his forehead to hers but he can’t find the words so instead he lifts her soaking body from the water and carries her back to shore. Her ship is close but his is closer. When he takes that path, he expects her to tense, to question him. But she doesn’t. She understands.
In this place, where they have done too much to each other, there is no more space for danger.