Algid (#TronnorAU)

Chapter 34: After a long time

He passed his lips softly over her skin, grazing it bit by bit, taking his time on every spot. His breath made her shudder, and her heart beat faster. He could feel her, he could sense her entering a frenzy, but he couldn't feel it himself. It was alien to him, foreign to his own senses. Like an exterior watcher rather than an actor in the play.

He passed his fingers through her hair; her red, beautiful hair that seemed to glow afire, which had always seemed to capture him in the deepest of trances. And still, he couldn't feel the heat emanating from it; from her. His fingers touched cold, his eyes remained open. The rush of sweat, mischief and pleasure was there, but that was it. There wasn't excitement. There wasn't frenzy, not for him.

Every time he cupped her breasts in his hands, he could feel her heart beating. The motion, the stress, the rhythm. He couldn't feel his heart beating the same way. Sure, it was there. Sure, it was exciting. But it wasn't the same. It wasn't synchronized. And that, unlike any time ever before in which it had been the same, bothered him now. Now more than ever, with Bethany or any of the other girls he'd ever been with, it really, really bothered him.

When he was inside her, the animal instinct that usually took over Connor wasn't there anymore. It had died out. Or perhaps, it hadn't ever been there. It was as if every time he had laid with her or with any other of the girls before he had been set into an automatic mode, like a machine which knew all its movements and always repeated them without failure. But machines don't think, they act out of habit. And Connor was realizing just now that he had lost the appetite for such habit.

And when it ended, she asked him to stay, like she had never done before.

-"... Hold me... please."—she had said in a soft whisper.

So he did, he held her tight, as if he were holding on to the things he wanted to keep for dear life. And she was there, and she was a person, and so was he. And they had been playing like this for so long now, and they knew each other's bodies by heart.

But even so, he felt like he was all alone. And if he asked Red, he suspected he would get a similar answer.

As he had her, he passed his palm over her scars. Those on her back, on her shoulder and below her arms. He had never asked what they meant. He had never wanted to know. She had never wanted to tell him, either.

But something else was different tonight. She had asked him to hold her, for starters, and now his mind raised so many questions. Questions that didn't seem to come out of curiosity, but something else. Perhaps it was the gloom and the melancholy December had brought upon everyone, or perhaps it was that Connor could sense that there was something going on in Alexa's mind. Inside that mysterious head of hers, behind her something fire and deep down, beneath her inner monsters.

The two of them remained that way in dreadful silence, needed silence. The only time on their shared meetings in which they could really afford such commodity. He wondered to himself, and like always, she could read right through his mind.

-"... Well why are you waiting for, hmm?"—she said, still held in Connor's embrace under the covers of her bedroom—"I know you well enough to tell that you have many questions to ask me right now, Green."

Connor stopped breathing, feeling how the tension build up in his throat. Immobile, he rendered a million different questions inside his head. Things he had been wondering for some time now, and he had never even thought about asking. It was weird, being given the good light to go on and ask them. And having that permission seemed so odd to him; it made it impossible for him to decide where to begin.

There were many questions in his mind now, as there had been for a while now. All along they had been torturous enough to cause him more than just mere curiosity. It made him question the motives upon which his "relationship" with Red was based on. The real material, the bedrock. The reasons behind why this was even a thing for the two of them. But right now, those weren't the questions that rested upon his mind.