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What they don’t tell you about concerts is how quiet everything feels afterwards — like the whole world’s shouted itself so hoarse that sound waves are now in short supply. The stillness hangs, thick and buzzing, in the air around Shiver’s shoulders. And they can’t get their mind off that kiss.
(It has to be normal, right? With all the pumping adrenaline and the screaming crowd and the deafening music thumping loud, so much louder than their hearts could ever dream, that kiss was just a release of energy. Something volatile catching fire, burning itself out just as quickly as it sparks. It was a glance across the stage, a snaggle-fanged smile, a slight “come closer” twitch in her fingers as she soloed on her bass — and Shiver’s mouth on hers, for just a millisecond. Just a heartbeat.
It’s an accident. It’s not anything. They have to stop overthinking this.)
“You about done, sharky, or will you need another five hours to stare off into space all brooding?”
Shiver bristles, and hurries to break down the rest of the drum kit. “I’m not brooding!”
“Sure you aren’t.” Frye leans a little further out of the van’s backseat window, her grin easy and her eyes twinkling. They can’t remember if that’s the side of the van with no window in the first place, or if she finally beat the ancient fucking crank mechanism on the other side to allow the poor thing to ventilate properly. All they can focus on is her crossed arms, dark and sweat-shiny against the white paint job; the curve of her chest as it rests on the window’s bottom edge; the way she tilts her head as she watches them, braided tentacle curling in an absent-minded fidget. “The extra hours are billable, y’know. And parking ain’t cheap around these nicer parts of town.”
“As if you’re paying.”
“Hey! I always pay my fair share!”
“Who bought the parking spot tonight? And every other night since we started this tour? And all the snacks? And fancy strings for your bass?”
Frye snorts, and her smile only widens. “Well, that’s ‘cause you offered to buy them for me.”
“Because you begged like you’re about to go into poverty!” Shiver stashes the final drum in the back of the van, securing the whole thing with cables, before stalking back over to Frye and her shit-eating smirk.
“Or maybe it’s that my pleading face works on you, huh, sharkbite?” Frye purses her lips and bats her eyes, and Shiver pushes her face back into the van where it belongs.
(“Oh, c’mon!” she whines as she loses her balance, flails, and collapses across the backseat. “Foul play! You know you like me!”
Maybe you’re right, Shiver thinks to themselves, and promptly vows to never entertain such disgusting, terrifying thoughts ever again.)
After a concert, even boisterous, summer-sunshine Frye falls quiet. She remains starfished in the backseat, raising a hand in greeting when Shiver clambers in through the van’s rear entrance to join her. They lean against the back of the seats where the fabric’s yellowed and torn and take final stock of everything: drums, guitars, basses, synths, ever-running laptops, dozens and dozens of spare parts, scrawled sheet music and sticky notes littered in lyrics, amps, speakers, the boombox Frye insists they carry around everywhere, the industrial-sized bags overflowing with microwave ramen…
Everything is accounted for. This is the width and breadth of Deep Cut, in the carved-out back of a van they bought (not stole, because they stuck a fifty under the owner’s welcome mat) where there isn’t even enough room to stand up straight.
Shiver wouldn’t trade it for the world.
Outside, there’s the faint hum of late-night traffic — stragglers from the audience, maybe — and delicate cricket song, but after burning up in the rush of glow sticks and spotlights and chants for an encore, it hardly feels real at all. Their fingertips are red from how hard they squeezed their guitar pick; when they tap their claws together, the sound is faint. They’re right here, ending where skin and body heat begin, so why does it feel like they left some shard of their soul up on that brilliant stage? Why do their hearts feel too big for these straining walls?
“Are we all good to go?” Frye murmurs. Her voice is soft and raspy around the edges again, that private tone she saves for when they’re alone together. On stage, her sunlight spills out for miles and miles, so bright she could blind, but here? In the aftermath, when the fans have gone home and all that’s left are sore throats and aching bodies and looming bills for this piece of shit van? She allows them a little glimpse of what lies beneath that smile.
(That smile which they’d kissed. That smile which had grown as they’d moved toward her, their hands and melody on autopilot as she consumed their whole world with her joyous, red fire — as she’d moved toward them, too, her bass dropping to hang by its straps as purple fingers reached out to take theirs — as their lips, hot and concert-cracked and adrenaline-shaking —
Shiver’s breath catches on an exhale, and for the thousandth time tonight, they remind themselves of what they and Frye are. Bandmates. Roommates. Friends from childhood. Planning to make music together until they die or go to jail, whichever comes last, and proprietors to so many memories it makes their chest ache. Late nights on rooftops they aren’t allowed access to, dancing like they’ve conquered the world, and enough stupid schemes — always Frye’s fault — to fill a memoir with. She always teases them, saying they’re the ones to execute her plans, so why should she get all the blame? But Shiver thinks she deserves a felony for the persuasive power in her eyes, when they sparkle with wonder and danger and won’t you be my partner in crime?)
“Uh, hello? Earth to Shiver?”
“Y-yeah, uh-huh,” they stammer, jolting back to earth. “We’re, uh, ready to go. Yeah.”
A slow, soft shuffling sounds behind them. When they turn, it’s to Frye sitting upright in the backseat, throwing her shawl over the headrest and wiggling out of the marigold-yellow top she saves for performances. Left beneath is a sports bra, rippling over her chest and gills as she adjusts the elastic, and planes of warm muscle. Collarbones and throat-hollow and cleavage that Shiver’s seen countless times before, but always finds themselves a little lightheaded from, like the world’s gone watercolored at the edges. She links her fingers over her head and stretches out her back, and the soft whine that stirs in the back of her throat is sinful.
Helpless, always so helpless when they’re around her — Shiver’s claws nip into their thighs even through their thick, leather pants. Not yours to admire, they chastise themselves. Not your teeth meant to cage her. She trusts you with this intimacy. Earn it.
They try to school their expression as she slouches against the seat back, arm thrown around the headrest and cheek squished against her knuckles. Her eyes never leave them, even as she stares up through her lowered lashes. It’s impossible not to burn alive under the gravity of her gaze.
“You feelin’ okay?” she asks. “Not my business unless you’re about to die and take this band with ya, I know, but you seem a little spacey today. How come? Are you in your head about the concert?”
“...I’m fine,” they manage. “The — the concert went great.”
“Hell yeah it did! We rocked this sleepy old town’s fucking socks off! We’ve never sounded that good before, not a single damn time. I can’t believe that drummer the venue gave us — Big Man was his name, yeah? — actually gave me his number! Oh, I’m so excited. He brought such awesome energy to the stage, I really hope we can collaborate with him again.”
She gesticulates with her free hand and her ears twitch on the highlights. Shiver wants to taste her exhale again, see if it’s sticky-sweet like before.
“...Shiver, listen.”
And the sunshine beaming from her fizzles out just like that. The van’s interior feels so much dimmer for it, even though it’s the same flickering incandescent struggling to tint the place warm as encroaching moonlight washes it all silver. Her ears hang low, her voice tightened around a shard behind her tongue. Since Shiver’s known her for longer than they’ve known themselves, they know it for the earnest worry she always tries to disguise.
“I, uh…” She hesitates, eyes flicking between her lap and their own gaze. “That kiss during the concert… you didn’t mind, right?”
Shiver is going to think about it for the rest of their life. “Not at all.”
“Nothing’s changed between us?”
Shiver will never look at her the same, not when they know how she tastes on an adrenaline high. “Nothing’s changed.”
“Oh, thank the gods.” She slumps with relief, glossy lips twitching up from her pleased little smile. “I was worried I’d fucked something up for a minute. You’re my best friend, Shiv, and I don’t want to ruin what we have. The heat of the moment just… made me act without thinking, I guess. I’m sorry.”
“You don’t have to apologize.” Now it’s their turn to shirk the eye contact. She shifts a little closer and if they don’t steel themselves, the sheer force of her care will powder them down to ash. “I didn’t… I really didn’t mind it. And I moved towards you, too, so it’s not totally your fault.”
She grins and it could kill them, if they’d let it. “Thanks, Shiv. First time I’ve ever seen you accept responsibility for something.”
“F-fuck off!” they hiss. “You’re ninety percent of the reason we even get into trouble in the first place!”
“Hey! All I wanna do is have fun and make good music!” She sticks her tongue out at them, and they swat at her face and miss on purpose, and she giggles until they grab her by the arm and tug her clear over the backseat and to the stretch of floor on which they’re sitting, which escalates into a grappling match where they both can’t help but laugh — and it’s easy like that. The little neutron star they’d just breathed into existence, all lies and the mangled viscera of truth, can disappear seamlessly beneath this blanket: of Frye’s world-class suplex as she wrestles Shiver down to the ground, of the triangle choke they catch her in before flipping their positions, of the maniacal cackle she lets out as she finds an opening that makes them see stars, skull kissing the floor.
And Shiver would win if they put a bit more effort into it, okay? They know Frye’s aggressive, brash attack strategy down to the second. There just… isn’t really a need, when she’s got a hand around their throat and her fingers splayed on their chest like this. When her body is solid and deliriously warm above theirs, grounding them when all they can do is float. When her face is so close, all exaggerated makeup and honey-thick lashes and triumphant smirk, complete with the scrunched brows. Her braided tentacle hangs so low it drags across Shiver’s fringe, and their tentacle-tips curl in response.
(In a parallel dimension somewhere, far beyond the low-hanging mist and the moon’s bright eye, Shiver realizes that they’re in love with Frye Onaga.)
Hot breath, warm lips — just barely ghosting over their own. They think of a thousand terrible things to say and zero good ones, and what comes out is, “D-do you want to dance with me?”
Frye sits back on her heels, and Shiver doesn’t think about how that means she’s straddling their waist, with the swell of her ass dangerously close to the vee of their hips. “Dance with you?” she giggles. “Do you even have to ask?”
She hops to her feet, feather-light, and helps them up with a hand that’s warmer than the sun. “So what are we feelin’ tonight, Shiv? Are we getting nasty to the house CD that Pearl lent us? Or is it a classic rock vibe tonight?”
“Our own music,” they rush out, before thinking it through for even a second. “Some of our older tracks that we burnt into those disks.”
“No!” Frye throws an arm over her eyes and ragdolls — collapsing directly into Shiver, who staggers with the effort of catching her. “Not our old music! Say it isn’t true! It sucks so bad!”
“It does suck so bad,” they agree. “Maybe because someone couldn’t keep a beat straight for four bars.”
She huffs and rolls her eyes. “Right, blame all our problems on me because your ego is the size of the whole Splatlands!”
“Y-you take that back!”
“Not until you admit I was better on the bass than you were on the guitar when we were first starting out.”
“So you want me to lie.”
“Call it what you like.” She leans more of her weight into them, pressing their temples together and idly tapping her fingers against their wrist bones, before skating her nails up their arm — the one that’s slung around her shoulder, keeping her close. Their other arm brackets over her middle, right beneath her chest, where the soft fabric of her bra disappears into toned abs and low-hanging pants. Her spine and shoulder slot perfectly against their front, and how is it that she always ends up so close?
Only a few short minutes pass before the ancient Deep Cut disks that Frye always tries to hide have been recovered, valiantly defended in a second grappling session, and slid into their souped-up stereo. The awkwardly mixed opening measures have Shiver wincing despite themselves, have Frye dragging a hand down her face while her grin nearly splits her cheeks, and the track just gets worse from there. With enough drama to put modern theater out of business, Frye offers her hand with a flourish.
“Shall we, sharky?”
Shiver smirks at her, wrapping their fingers around hers, and how is it that her confidence becomes theirs, too, every single time? “Practiced my choreography to this one just for you, sunshine.”
“Aren’t you such a cute, left-footed little liar?”
“Maybe you should shut up and be grateful before I drop you on the dip.”
Frye laughs and laughs, and spins them around in their overcrowded van with the too-low ceilings that they both hit their heads on a couple of times, and it’s perfect. She trips over stray extension cords and Shiver catches her, a hand on her hip; the momentum from her twirl sends them careening directly into a stack of boxes and she snickers so hard she chokes. And somehow, they both end up on the floor again, watching old sheet music float through the air as the embarrassingly lame outro fades out on the track.
“Damn,” Frye chuckles. Her face is so bright even without the streaming moonlight to illuminate it in white. “We really do suck.”
“At everything.” Shiver fails to bite back a smile.
And where along the way did they forget that, no matter the tangle in their throat or the twist in their guts, Frye’s very presence always makes things easier? That it’s okay if some fatal corner of their mind wants to taste the glimmer on her lips just once more, because the role they play at her side is carved so deep into their bones they couldn’t mess it up if they tried?
She turns to face them, cheek pillowed against her thick bicep. There’s such little space in this van, so she’s laying so close to them, fitting around every curve and corner their own body draws.
“I love you, y’know,” she says. Like it’s easy. For someone as summer-bright as Frye Onaga, it must be. “Thanks for being here with me.”
And Shiver wants to say it back, more than almost anything else they’ve wanted in life — but it strangles their throat before they can so much as exhale.
The next track, even worse than the first, starts up on the stereo and fills the air with music. Terrible music. Their music. Frye’s novice vocals and Shiver’s unpracticed playstyle, lyrics about nothing, drumbeats sampled from a downloadable audio pack.
“I miss being young and dumb with you,” Shiver says, out of all the things in the world to say.
Frye chuckles at that. “Wanna look for a van on a sketchy website, get jerked around by the guy allegedly selling it, and decide to steal it out from under him for a counterfeit fifty? Oh, wait, we did that six months ago. Shiver, baby, if we get any younger and dumber I think we might die.”
“The bill was counterfeit?!”
“You really think I’m paying him for wasting time that we could’ve spent practicing?”
“Frye, that’s grand theft auto!”
“Oh, please. You love it.”
“I do.”
Saying that comes a little easier, doesn’t catch as badly on the grain of their tongue. Frye’s eyes crinkle with warmth, and she rests her hand over one of theirs. And something about this moment — the moonlight cutting a divine silhouette from her shoulder, her waist, the meat of her hip; the music’s grainy audio caught in the bowels of their home away from home; the way their head still buzzes and their chest still twists, but the dog leashed to their hearts keeps pulling, chasing, struggling despite it, slack-jawed with the need to know — has them whispering,
“Can I ask you something stupid?”
And she breathes back with a smile, “Anytime.”
They turn their hand palm-out so they can squeeze her fingers in theirs. She squeezes back, and they just barely manage, “Y-you can’t hate me for it.”
Frye purrs sweetly in her throat, like that’s the easiest thing in the world to her, and it sets Shiver aflame.
Quiet inhales, scratchy guitars, the adrenaline crash after the concert turning all the world to clouds and stained glass. “I want to kiss you again.”
“Do you know how long I’ve been waiting to hear you say that?”
Before her rushed whisper even registers, there’s a hand on their cheek and a thigh slinging over their waist. Frye crawls impossibly closer and presses them together — lips and chests and the planes of their stomachs, down to the tangle of her legs around their middle. She’s soft. So impossibly, gorgeously soft despite how solidly her frame’s wrapped in muscle, despite all her rough edges and too-loud cheers and missed chords on the chorus. Their hearts threaten to burst out of their chest with how painfully they hammer, but her pressing her bodyweight in keeps all their sobbing viscera inside.
Her lips pillow against theirs, chaste just like it was during the concert. Those snaggled fangs impress pinpricks against their mouth, and it’s the only sensation they ever want to feel again because it’s Frye. Uniquely, beautifully, unmistakably Frye.
She pulls away, molasses-slow, and her eyes are like stars.
“How was that?” she breathes.
“Please don’t stop,” they gasp.
Carefully, like she’s climbing over crystalline glass, she settles more fully on top of them. Shiver sits upright, trembling — god, they’re trembling all over. Frye’s shaking, too, and they don’t know if it’s their own nerves radiating up her body or something wholly hers. She parts her lips as she closes the distance between them, all sharp teeth and purple tongue, and Shiver’s never wanted anything more. Not once.
They meet and it’s wildfire. Low, stirring heat at first, on their tongue as it twines and between their hands as they cradle her face, but it builds so fast it leaves them breathless. On their face, prickling with warmth and definitely a humiliating shade of crimson by now, maybe even a deeper shade of red than Frye’s bra. In their hearts that twitch and pulse around a roaring hearth of want and safe and please keep touching, don’t you dare stop. In their mouth, sent blazing when Frye grabs their head, just shy of aggressive, and maps out each contour of the colors past their lips — licking behind their teeth and tasting their tongue and pulling back just to breathe in their exhale, leaving both of them lightheaded while spit cools on their lips. Through their stomach, from the heat of Frye’s skin and the winding coil of fire beneath.
Her hand presses flat against their chest as she adjusts her position on their lap, bringing her legs around to cross her ankles behind Shiver’s tailbone. Their sarashi bindings linger on the edge of unraveling as she ghosts her fingers up and down the sides, purring when their gills reflexively twitch beneath the fabric.
“Shiver,” she rasps. Her lips are red and spit-sweetened, her voice strained. “How much… how far do you want to take this?”
Reverently, because surely this is one of those gut-wrenching dreams where she anoints them in her love only to leave them empty and aching when they wake up, they trail their hands up her back. Her skin is still sweat-slick from the concert and it makes them shake. And she’s real. More than their most convincing, aching daydreams, real. Right here with them.
(And how long has Shiver been hiding from this? From the sinking, tearing gravity of this want? How long has this been shackled up and left to bloom, to the point where they need to drown in her? Where the buzz in their muscles and the ache in their fangs just won’t stop until she’s theirs and they’re hers and the whole world knows it — until they’re screaming it from the city’s highest rooftops with her, like they’d scream old song lyrics all those years ago?)
(The track switches again. This one is slightly better. And Shiver, reduced to the quick and the bone and their collapsing, red heart, needs.)
“I want,” they whisper, “whatever you’re willing to give me.”
“Sh-Shiver,” she shudders. Their name sounds holy on her tongue. “I — you need to know that we — we can’t take this back. I can walk back from a lot of shit, but not… not this. Not what I wanna do to you.”
“What do you want to do to me, Frye?”
She hesitates.
“Say it for me. Please.”
“...Something neither of us have done before.” She burrows into the crook of their neck to hide her face, and they stroke the sensitive backs of her tentacles on instinct, like they were born knowing how to take care of her.
(Maybe they were. Maybe they were built around Frye’s shape, or maybe they’d grown into it, the way one grows into adulthood or your best friend’s clothes before you catch up to her in height.)
“Sunshine,” they murmur, and her ear twitches like a hummingbird’s wings. “I need you to look at me.”
She looks. Sits back upright, squirming from her tentacles down to her toes, but looks into their eyes with confidence they know she doesn’t feel — confidence they don’t feel either, but it can’t matter right now. They have to know what she means, or the sky will come crashing and they’ll never have this chance again.
Shiver cups her cheek in their palm, and she reflexively raises a hand to cover it with her own. Her hands are clammy and they want to kiss the worry off her face, so they do. It helps, a little, — that soft, hopeful flicker of shock through her eyes.
“I want to go all the way with you,” she admits, and she looks like she could cry.
Shiver turns their fingers so their claws wrap around the back of her hand. And mustering so much love and courage and sunlight it explodes out of their chest, warming everything up with summertime and gold, they bring her hand to their mouth and kiss her open palm. Frye squeaks, high in her throat, and they lean in to kiss the skin right over her voice box, too.
“Please,” they tell her. “I want it, too.”
(And in the deepest, darkest corners of nighttime, when not even the moon’s almond-sliver eye was there to watch and cast judgment, Shiver’s pictured it: if they ever got so lucky, what their first time with Frye might look like. They’d imagined it backstage, pre-concert nerves culminating in a shock of passion that left them both panting and in desperate need of a change. They’d imagined it at their apartment, where she’d jump into their bed in her boxers and tug them on top of her, golden eyes already dark with lust. They’d imagined it in this very place, where they’d wake up in the passenger seat and Frye would sit up in the back as the sun rose, a long day of roadtripping ahead of them commenced with a slow, sensual welcome.
The real thing takes their breath away, far more than their fantasies ever had.)
Shiver’s permission must embolden her: her hands find their sarashi again and unwrap it without hesitation, letting the fabric drape into a puddle behind them before moving lower, still; grazing their gill-slits enough to make their breath shake on her way to cup their waist. Her white-hot hold leaves them feeling small; her fingers nearly touch at the small of their back, most of their circumference held in her hands. On reflex, they grab onto her shoulders — so broad and strong, like everything else about her, so attuned to them. She leans in close, lashes low, and licks along their jawline. Bites their earlobe, drags her fangs over an earring. Runs her tongue down the column of their throat in a long, devastating stripe that turns into pointed sucks and nips, leaving Shiver digging their fingers into her shoulder blades and choking down the soft gasps that threaten to bubble out.
“Wanna hear you,” she murmurs into the dip of their collarbone. “Don’t be shy for me, sapphire. I’ve dreamed of making you sing like this for years.”
“Fuck,” they choke out, because what else can they say? Her voice is deliciously, deliriously husky and they want to burn in it. Frye chuckles low in her chest when an experimental breath over their nipple makes them squirm, and when she latches onto it with those devilish fucking lips and sharp fangs, teasing and worrying and sucking like hellfire — how else can they respond but —
“F-fuck, fuck, sensitive! A-ah, I can’t, if you k-keep it up, Frye, I’ll — fuck, fuck, d-don’t, ngh, don’t stop…”
“Wasn’t planning to, baby.” She detaches from one nipple, spit stringing between its flushed peak and her tongue, and starts work on the other. One hand comes up to thumb over their gills, earning jolt after jolt as they jerk in her hands, helpless and immobilized by her weight on their lap. “Not when it makes you blush like that.”
And gods help Shiver, because they know how single-minded Frye’s passion makes her, and with their body as her mark and her prey, they might just die. Frye mouths along their gill-slits and they groan, drooling down their own cheek like an animal — she bites dangerously close to their pulse-vein and a strangled keen rips out from their throat. All the while, her name spills from their lips — like a mantra, like salvation.
“Frye,” they moan, “ngh, Frye, I can’t — too much, too much —”
“Poor sharky,” she purrs. “Already overwhelmed. I haven’t even gotten us to the main course yet.”
Shiver parts their lips to ask what she means against the dregs of better judgment they’ve got left — but then they feel it. Frye pulls them in for a messy kiss, one arm circling their waist while the other brackets their back to cup their shoulder, and shifts her hips in an awful, heady way against their crotch, and they gasp out a moan like a whore. Their cock’s half-hard in their pants, struggling against the tight leather and so, so receptive to Frye’s body heat, to the mouthwatering friction she presses against it as she uses her hold to ease Shiver down onto their back, once again on top of them and a dream in moonlight’s silhouette —
“You look even better beneath me than you do in my daydreams, pretty boy.”
Frye smirks, indulgent and playful, as they bristle at her. “Don’t call me ‘pretty boy.’”
“How come? Your little problem sure seemed to love it. Maybe it would prefer ‘pillow prince’?”
Shiver’s cock jumps again, damn close to ripping through the fabric with how badly it throbs, and they curse every god and Frye’s lopsided grin and take it all back at once because they need this, need her, more than anything else.
“Not your pillow prince,” they growl at her. It’s just for show and she knows it.
“What are you to me, then? My lover?”
One of her hands, braced on the ground next to Shiver’s arm, trails up to their pec and squeezes. The other hooks into the waistband of their pants and pulls them down to their mid-thigh in one long, painfully slow drag, letting their boxers tent near her thigh.
“My boyfriend?”
A soft, husky purr against the shell of their ear before Frye sits up on her knees and unties her pants’ drawstring, wiggling free and tossing them aside in a few seconds — but still so horribly long when they need her touch now. She’s hovering her crotch over theirs, letting their cock feel her body heat but little else as it leaks a wet, dark stain into their boxers. Her boyshorts are tight, high-waisted — the same shade of red as her bra, with a musk-sweet, trickling wet patch right where her thighs meet. Gods, they can’t look away.
(Their mind catches up and their breath hitches — they can’t breathe right around that word. Boyfriend. Her boyfriend, hers. Shiver so desperately wants to be hers.)
Frye grinds her crotch down against their aching cock, finally, finally — they moan high and broken and she gasps loud and lustful, before coming down on her forearms to slot their mouths together again. And — gods, the friction, the layers, it scrambles their mind and immolates every part of them in scorching, holy fire. She rolls her hips excruciatingly slow, wrapping her arms around them again as they rut up into her, bodies flush from chest to thigh. Again, their mouths come together, all sweat and hot spit and lips left just a little bloody.
“My slut?” she whispers over their skin, grabbing their hip with one hand to slot them together just right — allowing the length of their cock to catch in her slit despite the fabric barrier. And Shiver can’t — they can’t — it’s too much, they’re so sensitive, she’s fraying all their nerves and singing them black, she’s a thousand suns and Shiver’s just left to tremble beneath her, cock throbbing, moans reaching a fever pitch —
“Frye,” they choke out, and there’s tears in their eyes and Frye’s mouth on their neck and everything, so much, the whole world crashing in, “I — I’m close, I’m gonna…”
“Me, too,” she hisses into their ear, “f-fuck, Shiv, you’re so gorgeous I can’t even believe — a-ah!”
They come together. Shiver writhes and swears helplessly into the cool air and Frye buries her face in their neck, keening softly, and they ride one another through it until the very last threads have come unraveled.
And then the world comes back, like clouds parting.
And beyond all the fire and the passion is Shiver, half-naked on the floor with boxers full of sticky come, and Frye lying limp on top of them with drenched underwear and her heartbeats racing against their skin. Shiver’s own keep rabbiting as the lust-high peels away, leaves them in their body again, beholden to every bruise and nick and kiss-bite Frye had lavished them with.
And their thoughts are still the same. They wouldn’t trade this for the world.
“You okay?” they ask her softly, once they remember the process of formulating coherent speech.
“I’ll live,” she groans softly. “How ‘bout you? Did I, uh, did I go too far?”
Shiver shakes their head, and brings a hand up to pet Frye’s tentacles. “You were perfect.”
They earn a contented purr for that. “So were you, pretty boy.” Before they can so much as open their mouth, Frye cuts them off, balancing herself on her forearms so she can levy them with a little smirk. “Or would you prefer ‘boyfriend’?”
Breathlessly, “Y-yeah. ‘Boyfriend’ is… that’s good, yeah.”
Frye giggles like wind chimes and New Year’s fireworks. The next track comes on and it’s the worst on the entire CD, but neither of them twitch so much as a muscle to get up and change it.
“Boyfriend it is.”