you're too young & eager to love

After watching Shame, a movie about a sex addict, I decided to indulge in writing emotional!sex. The ending half is a little choppy, in my opinion, because I was running out of steam. I broke 1000 words though!

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“We ran so hard we thought we would spit blood.”

Chason has been talking for nearly twenty minutes, unhurried, and pausing every time he catches the scent of some far off predator. (Men with guns and needles and immunizations – men who are searching for them.) The fire is dying, and his voice is low across the flames, thickened by the desert sand. Ita watches the way he tangles his hand into his thick hair near the nape of his neck, the beast inside of him laughing at the futility of their situation. She does not feel like laughing. She feels cold and hot simultaneously, caught somewhere between sadness and interest.

“That was just supposed to be the sound of childhood, you know. Heavy breathing and our feet scraping the hard earth. I was supposed to stop running, eventually.” The laughter crawls up his throat and out of his mouth though it sounds like a growl, grim and dangerous. “Every time I see a man kick a dog, I feel it behind my eyes.”

He is so very hungry. He has not hunted alone in years and the desert is not known for its hospitality. There is nothing to scavenge. Chason slips his heavy palm over his eyes and breathes out hard. He can smell her. Her scent is mingled with the desert now and the embers, with sweat and heat and prey-like. With his eyes covered he tells her that she is lucky – she has the gift of flight. For a reason he does not comprehend she laughs, short, and a little bitter.

“Come here.” He says suddenly.

Ita moves slowly but elegantly. Her clothes are burdensome and dirtied. The white is blotched by the sand and the sun, but they have protected her skin well. She looks like cream, Chason thinks. There is sand in her hair and he can feel it against his fingers when he places his palm behind her neck, coaxing her down and towards him. He looks at her lips, her fingers, the pale color of her eyelashes. She found wet sand earlier and she had dug deep to get to the seeping water; there is dirt beneath her broken fingernails as a result and when he takes her thumb into his mouth, biting softly, he tastes the wasteland.

Ita turns her long neck and Chason anchors the hold he has in her hair. He catches her in mid-turn, his mouth full and hot against hers. He feels her hands on his arms, their tight stillness, and the way she wavers. There is a rip inside of him, a gash made of teeth and claws, and he feels the hunter inside escape. When he kisses her again it is more like biting; he digs his fingers into her clothes, stripping the first wrapping of cotton away from her.

Ita makes a noise that he associates with the wounded and suddenly Chason, with great effort, stills. His hands are at her throat. He’s not sure why, but he strokes his fingers up and across her jaw, touching the corner of her mouth. He thinks he feels her tremble, but her eyes are very clear in the dark. Her breathing is shallow and he drops his right hand to slip it beneath the gauzy material of her shirt, touching the smooth expanse of her stomach. Somewhere inside of her there are wings threatening to tear free, beating against her heart.

“I don’t take without permission. You have to want this.” He tells her and his voice is very soft, softer than she’s ever heard. “You need to tell me. Do you want this?”

He feels the shape of her answer against his fingertips.

-

Chason undresses her slowly. He places his mouth against her spine and moves up, tracing the knots of her hollow bones with his tongue. He keeps a hold of her in some permanent way, either by gripping her hip or tangling one of his hands into her hair.

He is a heavy weight, but he braces himself above her with his arms, murmuring noises into the night. The desert is still around them, and they sink into the sand, making shapes and markings that will confuse the men following their tracks.

Ita does not know what to call this, a place before tears.

He is rough and demanding, unaccustomed to her slender body, her delicate frame. They are not used to each other yet. He hears the cackling, howling sonata inside of him instead of the sounds she makes. But he is keenly aware of the trembling in her legs, the almost panicked, desperate way she lifts her hips to meet his thrusts. With his teeth against her collarbone, he makes her come.

It happens with a fierceness he was not expecting.

-

She is bruised by morning. Her lips are swollen.

The smell of himself against her skin, inside of her, wakes him before the rising sun. His palm against her lower back, he strokes the skin there absently. Ita stirs and there is a slackness to her mouth, a comfortableness to the way she now sleeps against him that worries Chason.

He untangles himself from her body unceremoniously. The movement and the sound of him dressing wake her. She watches the way he pulls his shirt on, followed by his jacket, and how he turns his head into the wind. He tells her that they need to start moving.

The sun breaks over the horizon, and Ita’s hair shines like a crown. Chason shields his eyes with his hand. He wears the same slick smile he wore when photographed at the facility; when he laughs at nothing, Ita hears it as a question she wants to spend her whole life answering.

He destroys the remnants of the night’s fire. Ita is unsteady on her legs as she waits, and he wonders if it’s because of him. He wonders many things. When she tries to brush aside the hair that falls into his face, he catches her wrist. He has the keen gaze of an animal still – a quality about him that promises never to be sated. “What’s happened to you?”

Not without force, she pulls herself free, rubbing her sore wrist afterward. She is able to meet his gaze before looking past him, steeling herself in a way he hadn’t thought likely.

“I saw you last night. I didn’t cause all of those bruises.”
“… There are birds in the distance. They’re circling water. We head in that direction.”
“So we’re strangers yet.”

He does not see the flinch in her eyes. He makes a noise heavy with resentment before turning, moving easily across the sand. She falls after thirty feet, stumbling in her inappropriate shoes, weighed down by her clothes once more. Chason does not help her this time. He bites his tongue and his instinct, shoving his hands into his pockets.

-

It takes most of the day for them to reach the water. It is a shallow, unimpressive lake, more mud than water, but it is cool beneath the blazing sun.

Even after Ita seeks solace in the murky lake, Chason can still smell himself on her. It sears his senses like a brand, an oil she cannot shake from her feathers.
A thread he can track.