Archive of Our Own

In the years since her youth, Venus had long lost count of how many men had touched her without ever asking her name. She had stopped keeping track somewhere in the hundreds - not because the number ceased to matter to her, but because it had begun to. They accumulated instead like scar tissue, thin enough that no single layer could be blamed for the pain, until one day Venus had discovered that she could no longer remember what uninjured skin had felt like.

Alexander Trager was not one of those men. 

Tonight he sat on her couch with his boots kicked off by the door and his jacket hung crookedly on the hook, as if he belonged there - as if he felt at home in her world. Venus watched him idly working a loose thread from the hem of his jeans, his hands occupied but unhurried, as if there was nowhere else they would rather be.

The lamplight caught the silver of faint scars across his knuckles, a reminder of what sort of things Alex typically used his hands for. Venus knew those hands - she had seen them wrapped around a pool cue, gripping a gun, bloodied and clenched into fists when his anger got ahead of him. Those hands had done ugly, ugly things - and somehow, impossibly, they were the gentlest thing that had ever touched her.

"You alright, darlin'?" he asked, without looking up.

"I'm... just thinking." She crossed the room and sat beside him, close enough that her knee brushed his. He let it stay there, didn't shift away, didn't slide a hand up her thigh or roughly pull her onto his lap like the knee had been an invitation to skip every step between where they were at now and the part he actually wanted. The part she had been taught every man eventually wanted.

Alex just let their legs rest together, and kept working the thread around his thumb.

"Thinkin'?" His voice had gone a little rough, a little careful, the way it did whenever he suspected she was thinking about something that would make him want to hurt somebody on her behalf. "'Bout what?"

"You." Her gaze lingered on the point where her bare skin met the worn denim of his jeans. After a moment she let a smile creep across her lips, and said: "As you surely know, someone has to make up for the thinking you don't do."

That got a sound out of Alex - not quite a laugh, but the essence of one. "Yeah? That right?"

"Alexander Trager, you possess many wonderful qualities..." Venus reached out, her fingers ghosting over Alex's jaw before drawing away. "But you have to admit that a powerful intellect simply isn't among them."

Alex smiled, crooked and genuine, and let go of the thread he'd been worrying. He looked up at her, and there it was again, that feeling she still didn't have a name for. 

Alex always looked at her face. Not down at her chest, not past the features she'd been born with toward the ones she'd fought for, not through her toward some fantastical mental image of some other woman he'd rather be looking at. He was always looking at her.

"C'mere," he said, and reached for the lamp beside them instead of for her, turning it down to a gold gone soft at the edges. Only then did he reach for her, his calloused hand settling at her jaw with the care one might use on something precious and easily startled. 

She leaned into his familiar hand and let him tip her face toward his, and a familiar spark of adrenaline went through her - here it comes, the part where the gentleness is a down payment on something rougher, where the hand at your jaw becomes the hand at your throat, becomes the thing you let happen because you already let the first part happen, and by then what's the use in stopping-

Instead, Alex kissed her.

He kissed her like it was the very first time - slow, deep, and achingly certain as his thumb moved along her cheekbone in unhurried circles.

"Venus..." Her name fell from his lips when he pulled back an inch, just enough to say it. 

Nobody ever said her name. They always said other names, the names of other women and other men and other people they were picturing in place of Venus. They said what they truly wanted or nothing at all, but never her name, because it was never her they wanted. And now Alex had said it, Venus, like he wanted to make sure she was still the one he was doing this with. The way Alex said it, she knew - she knew he wanted it to be her.

He kissed her again, and his fingers lingered over her cheekbone for a long moment before they reached down found the buttons of her blouse.

One by one the buttons opened beneath his patient hands, and there it was - there was the part she knew, the part with a shape she could map with her eyes shut, and she reached up on instinct to help him along, her fingers moving towards the clasp at the small of her back before she even decided to move them, wanting to be ahead of it, wanting to hand him the thing he wanted before he had to ask for it because that was faster, that was cleaner, that was how you kept your own hands on the wheel even when someone else was driving, just stay in control, keep ahead of it-

Alex caught her wrist. Gently. Which somehow undid her more than if he'd been rough about it.

"Whoa... hey, none of that," he whispered into her neck, his gravelly voice ghosting over her skin. "Not tonight. You know you ain't gotta rush for me."

"We have all the time we need, love," Alex said, and there was something almost sheepish in it, like he'd surprised himself with how much he meant it. "In a minute. I promise you, in a minute. But right now I want-" He stopped, and after a moment he laughed, shaking his head. "Christ, listen to me. I sound like a damn Hallmark card." He brought her wrist, still caught in his hand, to his mouth instead and kissed the pulse point, and when he spoke again his voice had dropped into something rawer, stripped of the joke. "I ain't looked at you enough yet. That's all. Just... lemme look at you a minute."

The admission seemed to embarrass him more than any confession of violence ever had, and Venus almost smiled. Of course. Alexander Trager could talk about blood and death and all sorts of distasteful things without blinking, but tell a woman she was beautiful and suddenly he looked like he wanted the ground to swallow him whole.

After a moment, as if he was giving her a chance to back out, Alex pulled her hand closer and kissed the skin on the inside of her elbow, followed by, tenderly, the ridge of her knuckles, one at a time.

As he went, Alex was like a man saying grace over a meal he had the intention of savoring. Venus let him have the lead, if lead was even the word for what this was, since Alex didn't seem to be going anywhere, he wasn't racing, wasn't taking everything he wanted without a single thought for what she wanted.

His mouth moved to her collarbone. Stayed there. Just - stayed, an unbearable, luxurious while, his breath warm against her skin, against the body that had spent years learning not to expect this kind of patience spent on it.

His hand slid beneath her loosened blouse but didn't go chasing for the clasp of her bra, didn't go for the obvious place he'd get to eventually - instead his palm settled flat against her ribs, over her heart, feeling the pulse that Venus could hear thundering in her ears.

"You can touch me too, you know," he murmured against her throat, and she realized her hands had gone slack at her sides, forgotten, the old training from her youth kicking in without conscious thought - stay still, let them take what they want, it goes faster if you don't fight back - a training that had nothing to do with what was actually happening here.

She brought her hands up. Rested them against his chest first, feeling. The warmth of his body. His heart under her palm. Beneath the thin cotton of his shirt, that heart was hammering faster than his slow hands and reverent kisses were letting on - faster, she realized, than hers.

"There you go," he said, and the words shook a little, and she understood then that this was costing him just as much as it was healing her, that his hands weren't steady because he was calm, they were steady because he was working very hard not to shake.

His fingers traced the line of her spine. He let out a low hum against her throat, his other hand drawing idle patterns against the fabric still separating her chest from his palm, in no hurry at all to move past it.

Every man that Venus had been with before Alex had touched her like her body was a lock and their hands were the keys, every touch aimed at her giving way to the prize that they truly wanted. 

Venus swallowed, once, twice. Then once more. Something was wrong with her breathing, and her eyes were stinging before she understood why.

Her vision blurred.

She turned her face away, on reflex, that years-old reflex - don't let them see it get to you, that's information they'll use against you - but Alex's hand came up, a gentle touch at her jaw again, turning her back, and he must have seen it before she managed to hide it, because his whole face changed.

"Hey," he said, shifting closer until their knees overlapped completely. "Hey, hey. What'd I do, baby?"

"Nothing," she said, and her voice cracked on the word. Alex frowned, confused. "That's- that's the trouble, Alex. You didn't do a thing. No man does nothing. Not like this. I haven't-" her voice broke again, and she tried to blink away the tears that were already falling down her cheeks. "I haven't had it like this before. No one has ever... given me this. No one except you, Alexander."

Understanding crossed his face. Without another word, Alex gathered her close, pulling her fully into his lap and wrapping both arms around her. He drew her against his chest until her ear rested over his heart, hearing that same too-fast heartbeat she'd felt under her palm a minute ago, matching pace with the one in her own chest. One broad, warm hand splayed across her back. The other found her fingers and laced them with his, holding tight.

She cried then, and it was the kind of crying that wasn't really about the moment it was happening in - these quiet, shaking tears were for every night that had come before this one, for every rough hand that had taken and taken and left her with nothing, for every version of herself that had learned to leave her mind out on the doorstep just to survive what was done to her body inside. 

As she cried, Alex didn't try to hush or quiet her. He didn't check his watch, didn't get that stillness men got when a woman's tears became an inconvenience they were waiting out, like the tears were a storm preventing them from going outside to play with their toys. 

Alex just held her, one of his hands finding her hair and combing through it with the same rhythm his mouth had used against her collarbone a few minutes before - like her hurt and her grief were just another part of her he wanted to get to know without rushing. Another part he accepted without hesitance.

"What're you apologizing for?" Alex murmured, his touch lingering as he ran his free hand up and down her arm.

"I... I'm..." Venus faltered when she found that she didn't know what she was apologizing for.

"We got time, sweetheart," he said into her hair, voice low and steady. "Told you. I ain't going nowhere."

Venus squeezed their joined hands harder. His heartbeat thumped beneath her ear, strong and real. Venus listened to his heartbeat and for once she couldn't hear that invisible clock ticking down. There was only Alex - his warmth, his patience, and that new, quiet promise.

For the first time in longer than she could remember, Venus didn't feel like she was waiting for something to be taken from her.