Rift Control and Craving
Lou fixed his stare on the cracked chrono-device, every muscle locked tight against the pull to turn. The derelict safehouse hummed with the low, fractured whine of the rift, and beneath it something worse—the readout kept stuttering, losing lock every few seconds, which meant the anchor point was drifting and neither of them knew how many more jumps the thing had left in it before it stranded them somewhere with no way back at all. He poured every scrap of focus into the flickering numbers, refusing to acknowledge Lara behind him. Her presence filled the space anyway, her breathing scraping over his nerves like a provocation she probably didn’t even mean. He would not look. He would not speak. The wanting had grown too sharp since the last jump, and giving it even an inch would mean claiming her outright.
His shoulders stayed rigid, skin drawn tight over bone under the dim emergency lights. He remembered the last fractured displacement, her body pressed against his in the dark, the give of her against the leanness of him, and the memory alone sent heat crawling low in his gut, ugly and possessive. He crushed it down until his jaw ached. The device beeped, a useless stutter of code, and he leaned closer, pretending the rift’s pulse didn’t echo the throb already building behind his zipper.
Lara shifted somewhere behind him, fabric dragging against skin, loud in the charged air. Lou’s fingers twitched on the console edge. He wanted to pin her, to feel her yield to him, and more than that—he needed to be the one who decided when. That was the part he couldn’t say out loud even to himself: that some nights he lay awake running the math on whether what little he had was enough to get her there, and the only way he’d ever known to answer that fear was to control every second of it, to make her wait until he said so. If she came apart before he chose the moment, it would mean nothing he did mattered at all. The thought alone made his hands curl against the console.
The rift hum deepened, vibrating through the floor and up into his bones, unstable, climbing in pitch. If the safehouse wasn’t secure—and it wasn’t, not really, just four walls and a door that didn’t lock—then whatever happened here happened now, fast, standing, because there might not be a later. Each breath from her direction pulled his head a fraction toward her before he forced it back. Sweat traced his spine. He could smell her, warm skin and the metallic tang of the displacement still clinging to them both. His thoughts circled the need to drag her close, to band an arm over her chest and shove his hand between her thighs until she pulsed around him.
Another minute of this and the last thread would snap. His head turned, just enough to catch her in his periphery, the soft curve of her under the thin shirt. The rift gave a harder flicker, light stuttering across the walls, and the sound of it—a sharp electric crack—was the thing that finally broke him. He no longer cared about readings or fixes. He moved before the thought finished forming, closing the distance until he stood at her back, one hand spreading across her waist, fingers pressing into the give of her, pulling her flush against him. The contact ignited, hot and claiming, and he walked her forward those last few steps toward the console, hands already dragging at her shirt, shoving it up and out of the way, working the waistband of her bottoms down over the curve of her hips and past her thighs until they pooled somewhere near her knees, his own trousers shoved down just far enough, nothing left between them by the time her belly met the console’s edge.
He meant to stay pressed against her, chest to her back the way he’d imagined it a hundred times, but the moment he tried to angle himself into her his hips only found the soft resistance of her, nowhere near close enough, blocked by the very shape of her he’d spent so long wanting. He cursed under his breath and gripped her hip, guiding her forward and down until she bent over the console properly, forearms braced flat against the metal, her back sloping away from him at last. That was what let him step in, chest no longer flush to her spine but hovering just above it, his hips notched into the cradle of hers from this new, lower angle. His cock nudged at her entrance, barely breaching before he pulled back, shallow, grinding, rubbing the head against her folds without sinking deeper—there wasn’t enough of him to do much else, and he knew it, so he braced one hand on the small of her back and let the other do the real work, snaking around her hip to find her clit, fingers working tight, deliberate circles while his hips rocked in short strokes just to keep the friction alive.
Her belly cushioned the edge of the console, softening the bite of it, and with her breasts so slight there was nothing in the way when he finally reached his free arm beneath her and across her chest, banding her close, palm flattening over the modest weight of her. She rocked back against him anyway, chasing more length than he had, grinding down to create the pressure his thrusts alone couldn’t give her, and he let her, jaw clenched, feeling every inch of what little contact he had ride the slick heat of her.
The wet sound of his fingers mixed with the rift’s dying hum. Her body tensed against his palm before he understood why, her inner walls clamping down hard and sudden around the shallow tip of him, a sound tearing out of her that he’d never heard before, ragged and involuntary. She pulsed around him, clenching, shaking, and he felt every ripple of it against the head of his cock without ever having buried more than an inch of himself inside her. He froze. He had not finished. He had not even started, not really, and she was coming apart under his hand like he’d had nothing to do with the timing of it at all.
He held her there, arm still banded across her chest, fingers slick and unmoving against her now-oversensitive clit while her stomach heaved against the console’s edge. His cock throbbed, hard and untouched, still just barely inside her, aching for something that hadn’t come. The rift flickered brighter behind his eyes, and the room felt like it was tilting a half-second out of sync with itself. She was still shaking. He could feel it in the way her spine trembled beneath the arm he had wrapped over her, in the way her breath kept catching like she couldn’t quite land back inside her own body.
His jaw tightened. He didn’t move, didn’t pull back, didn’t finish what he’d started—just stood there with her weight sagging into him and the rift humming its unstable warning through the floor, the whole act left hanging, unresolved, exactly the way everything else about this exile had been.