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If they continue the trend of doing everything backwards — adopting a daughter first, then getting married, and moving in after that — the situation at the moment does seem like a perfectly logical next step.
Except this everything is all fools’ gold. A lie.
On the other hand, they are married even though the romantic involvement is lacking.
And since they can’t see other people for the fear of being discovered, their fake marriage doesn’t leave much room to have sex with anyone but each other.
And if his wife is unhappy, then his mission is jeopardised. Loid can’t have that.
That part of Operation Strix of course goes unreported, though Loid is sure the Handler would love to hear all the details.
What throws him off is that… It doesn’t feel like a mission. It feels—
—a tightly wound coil stuck in his nape springs free, sending a ripple of electrified relief down his spine. Yor has her thumbs digging into the dips where the neck meets his shoulders, pressing hard against the corded muscle until it gives.
Loid lets out an involuntary groan, his mind snapping back to focus.
“You are very tense,” Yor says gently, her hands sliding up and down his shoulders.
“Sorry,” he scrambles, biting the inside of his cheek to stop himself from producing any more undignified sounds.
The bedroom is dark, the curtains drawn save for a small night lamp to see by. Loid hopes the shadows are deep enough to hide his wince of embarrassment.
It’s awkward that Yor has to bring him back to focus when. When.
“It’s okay,” Yor says quietly, cupping his cheek so he would look at her. Yor is painfully considerate, so much that they often collide somewhere in the middle, fumbling. Twilight was used to wrenching pleasure from women until they were pliant and ready to spill their secrets in an exhausted afterglow. There are no secrets to drag from her, and it throws him off balance when instead of simply taking, his wife is actually very keen on giving .
And he finds himself very bad at receiving.
Where Yor lacks in experience, she certainly makes up with her eagerness to learn how to make him feel good too, even though it’s unnecessary. Where Loid expected her to be an embarrassed, shy mess, Yor is still slightly embarrassed and still shy, but too focused on him for Loid to stay unaffected.
Well. At this point Loid should just accept that his wife is never what he expects her to be.
She blushes a flushed pink but soldiers on through the embarrassment of her own. “We agreed to do this only if we both enjoy it, right? We can stop anytime. It’s just… you’re really tense.”
Loid nods, “I am enjoying it, really. I don’t want you to feel…”
“Inadequate?” Yor finishes for him, and he nods again. Her blush darkens, but Loid still feels her clench around him and— oh. She offers him a shy smile, faintly playful in the corners of her mouth. “I wouldn’t worry about that.”
Loid sinks on his elbows, bringing them closer. Yor’s eyes flicker to his mouth and back, and he doesn’t need any more encouragement to lean down and kiss her.
Time stumbles and skids to a stop, mellowed out to an unhurried languid glide.
Loid shifts so he can push deeper, a slick slide of their bodies, wet where they meet. Yor keens into his mouth, and Loid feels his lips curve into a smile. There. The angle that makes Yor sigh, her fingers twitching as they wind into his hair, not yet pulling but scratching at the skin. He brushes a finger around her clit, feathery light graze before she gets oversensitive. His own arousal dimming to a simmer, a background noise to Yor, twitching under him and gasping.
Yor reaches up to kiss him again, syrupy-slow, grinding up against him in small circles, slowly, almost like it’s an afterthought. And Loid is, too, content to rock into her with shallow thrusts, more focused on the soft, plushy touch of Yor’s lips and the warmth of her embrace than the velvety hot clutch around his cock.
When there is no space between their bodies for deceptions and no air to spare for sweet lies to tell, it’s difficult to rediscover the blueprint for the feelings he should hold, and yet doesn’t.
What would it feel like, if he really was a husband making love to his wife?
Loid turns his head so Yor’s lips smear a damp trail across his cheek to shove his face into a pillow, jammed between her shoulder and the sheets; a safe space where he can finally let go and breathe, as exhales push out of him in hitching moans past his lips.
It’s too dark to see, they are pressed too close, but Loid feels how wet, thick it is where she’s stretched around his cock, somehow getting even wetter and messier with each stuttered grind of his hips.
He moans again, voice thinning out at the end. It’s almost soundless when muffled into the bedsheets. Safe.
Yor’s fingers in his hair stop scratching his scalp and instead, they pull, and Loid resists, not sure he could be quiet enough if he faces her. Yor pulls again, and it stings, spreading prickling heat from his nape all the way down his spine.
Loid does not whimper at that.
“Hey,” Yor breathes, when he finally tips his head to look at her. The grip on his hair releases, “it’s alright. You don’t have to hide, okay? I, ah… I like hearing you.”
Loid bites his lips, and Yor’s hand slides around to cup his cheek, thumb pressing against the seam of his mouth until the pad of her finger slides in, grazing his teeth. Yor clenches tighter around him, nudging against him, the slick friction like a tidewave dragging him under, choking him with the noises sticking to the back of his throat.
Loid is helpless to muffle his sounds, her thumb still prying his mouth open, and he moans, deafeningly loud in the hazy shadows of the bedroom.
“It’s alright.”
It’s mortifying. It makes Yor shudder, grind her hips harder against him, her hand slipping from his mouth to wrap around him.
“Loid, ah,” Yor gasps, and— she’s so tight. Her breath is an uneven staccato, broken with each thrust, “Loid…”
He takes in a breath, deep enough so his chest hurts, locking the air and everything else inside. He has to keep it together, lest something monstrously truthful comes spilling from the inside of the cracked shell of Loid Forger.
His lungs scream at him, and there are black spots flying in front of his eyes, so he snaps them shut, falling into blackness, red around the edges, into wet, tight heat.
He can’t bear to look at her, not when he knows Yor is going to see someone else in his stead, someone he is not, he could never be.
Then he would need to admit that it’s important to him. For Yor to see him. Whoever he is, under the cracked veneer of Loid Forger, Twilight flayed off, someone he himself has long forgotten was underneath it all.
Or maybe there is nothing left, just an empty space, long gone and withered when he didn’t notice.
“Loid!” Yor arches, pressing them together, and he opens his eyes to see hers flutter closed, lips red and slack as she comes.
When Yor comes, she curls on herself, as if trying to make herself smaller— and somehow omnipresent, encompassing Loid, from the dripping clench around his cock to the vice grip of her legs around him, her hands clutching at him hard enough Loid thinks they might bruise.
(Some absent part of him almost hopes they would. So he could press at them the morning after, see the skin pale beneath the touch, the dull pain reminding him that he is something solid and existent.)
As Yor quiets down with the last of the aftershocks, Loid starts to pull out and finds that he simply just… can’t, the lock of her hips around him unmoving, pinning him in place. And that’s what tips him over as he spills with a choked wet groan muffled in her shoulder, taking one last shuddering gulp of air as the riptide of his orgasm drags him down, so intense it is almost painfully unbearable.
But Yor is there, the dig of her knees at his sides, holding him amidst of it all as he shakes.
Grounding.
For a moment, there is silence, interrupted only by Yor’s breathing, sticky and unmeasured, gradually slowing down.
Loid tries to ignore the tremor in his arms, lest he falls down, and follows her suit, trying to match his breaths with hers.
In, out, slowly, again. And again. Until Yor spreads her legs, letting him go. Loid sways sideways and collapses in a rather ungraceful heap of limbs beside her.
The world comes around him in shards: light fingers idly playing with his hair. Pulse rabitting in the back of his throat.
He just needs the space between three breaths to stitch himself back together. A breath, another, and one more. To return as Twilight beneath the mask of Loid Forger, a caring husband who shouldn’t really be lying around in a broken pile, but to hold his wife in an afterglow. Yor would notice something amiss, she always does. He cannot compromise himself so.
And Yor does notice. But instead of questions and suspicions, there’s a rustle by his side, a feathery weight of a duvet covering his cooling, sweaty skin.
“Sorry,” he croaks and winces at how raw and scraped his voice sounds.
“You are shaking,” Yor points out, and to his surprise, Loid finds out that he is.
“Dammit,” he tries to chuckle. The sound is brittle and fragile to his ears.
“Loid,” Yor asks quietly. Her hand reaches out to cup his face, and he automatically jolts at the unexpected touch. Yor starts pulling back, but Loid catches her fingers with his own, covering her hand between his and his cheekbone. “Loid, are you okay?”
There’s a stone stuck in his dry throat, smarting. But as much as he works around the suffocating knot of words he can’t say, the only thing that bubbles up to the surface is a strained exhale.
Is Loid Forger okay? He must be.
Is Twilight okay?
And what is he, an impostor of a man who crawled into Loid Forger’s skin, someone who is not Twilight anymore because he’s got everything Twilight has long thrown away.
What has he become and what is he to do with it all?
“Of course,” Loid finally manages. “Why wouldn’t I be?”
An emotion passes across Yor’s face, indescribable and too fleeting to parse. Her fingers slip away from his face and she doesn’t press further.
“We should sleep,” she murmurs, tucking herself in. Loid nods but he knows that he won’t. Too strung up, despite the exhaustion and the pleasant soreness sloshing inside.
Yor slots almost perfectly, hand splayed over the expanse of his chest, rising with each exhale. He feels his heartbeat resonating against her palm, alive. Soft puffs of air in his ear. Calmer and softer with each breath.
“It won’t make things weird between us, right?” Yor whispers into the silence of the bedroom. There is no one to hear them, but they are still speaking in a hush. If they were to speak any louder, it feels like the sound would break the thin, fragile pretence.
“No,” Loid says, because it can’t; the stakes are too high. And because he will mould himself into whatever shape needed, so it won’t. “Things are going to be okay.”
“I’m glad,” he feels Yor smiling, the movement of her lips against his skin.
Because the truth is yet to be named, but already so big, and significant, and so scary to acknowledge. But as long as it stays nameless, soundless, and hidden — there’s hope it’s not real.
“Yeah,” Loid agrees. It’s so close to honesty that for a second he feels a pang of anxiety of being found. “Me too.”
Loid waits until Yor falls asleep pressed against his side. He has never slept in someone else’s presence, let alone in someone else’s embrace. He wonders what it would be like. He wonders why it’s so easy to let his guard down; he wonders why the prospect of doing so doesn’t terrify him and instead. Instead. He wants it.
Silence without any secrets to steal, sweet deceptions to lie, is bare. Yearning to be filled with sound.
Because there it is; beneath the cracked masks, the paper-thin shell: where Yor’s breaths resonate inside the carved hollow that holds the heart of the human body, blooms the truth.
Twilight has never wanted to tell anything to anyone as he wants to tell her his name.