Chapter Text
He’s strangely nervous walking to her quarters that night. After everything they’ve said and done, it should feel like just another evening—but no, he’s lying to himself, of course it isn’t. It’s the first time that there are no secrets between them, no more hesitation.
Chakotay can smell food—surprisingly, uncharred—as he stands outside the doors. “Come in,” Kathryn calls.
Maybe it’s just him, but the room feels warm, aglow, Kathryn most of all. Or it could be the candles on the table. He starts to walk to her and she meets him halfway for a long, lingering kiss, stroking his cheek with her hand when they finally separate. “That’s my favorite hello,” he says. There’s a wisp of hair falling across her face; when he goes to tuck it behind her ear, he realizes that her hair is—was—in some kind of more complicated braid before he threaded his hands into it during the kiss. “You look beautiful—I’m sorry about your hair.” She does look beautiful, now that he's allowed to say it aloud. He always loves her in her uniform, but there’s something special about her now, when she’s in ordinary civilian clothes, this version of her that only he sees.
She kisses him again. “It may be my favorite version of hello too,” she tells him. She tugs at the collar of his shirt. “You dressed up.”
“Well. I suppose I’ve been thinking of this as—a first date,” he admits. “And my mother taught me to dress nicely for a first date.”
“Only the first?” Kathryn laughs and smooths her hand over the cloth covering his shoulder, his chest. “Come on, we shouldn’t let dinner get cold.”
Chakotay looks at the dinner table. “Kathryn, I don’t want to get off on the wrong foot—” she smiles at that “—but you cannot persuade me that you cooked this meal.”
Her eyes are dancing as she sits down. “Why do you say that?”
“It looks edible.” He lifts a few grains of rice on his fork to demonstrate. “This rice hasn’t turned to liquid.”
“That was once!”
“Because I never let you make the rice again,” he points out.
“I was never given the opportunity to redeem myself,” she grouses. She lifts a bottle of wine out of its chiller. “Do you want some? If there’s one culinary skill I do have, it’s pouring wine.”
“I’m familiar with that one.” Chakotay smiles at her, and it turns into a silly grin when she smiles back. He offers her his empty glass.
“You’re right, I didn’t cook this. In the replicator or outside of it.” He slides his leg against her bare one under the table and she bobbles the wine a little as she pours, splashes a few drops on his hand. Chakotay brings his hand to his mouth and licks the wine off, slowly, his eyes fixed on her. Kathryn flushes red. “Someone else went to a lot of trouble preparing this meal,” she says. “We should eat it.”
It's not exactly the first thing on his mind, but it does smell good. “To whoever replicated the meal,” he says, raising his glass. Kathryn toasts with the wine bottle and then fills her glass to take a sip, and he suppresses the laugh. “I don’t know why this feels so strange,” he admits. “We’re the same people we were this morning.”
Kathryn offers her hand across the table. He interlaces his fingers with her own and leans forward to kiss their joined knuckles. “Yes,” she says. “But it does feel different.” She looks down at the food. “I’m not really hungry.”
“No. Neither am I.” He’s not sure which of them moves first, but the food gets pushed to the side, the candle wobbling dangerously, and he lifts Kathryn onto the table so he can stand between her legs. He kisses her, one hand on the back of her head and the other running down her spine to pull her flush against him, and she licks into his mouth greedily. Her tongue is soft against his, tart with wine. He’s ruined her braid entirely now, the curtain of hair tumbling loose down her back as she presses close against him. Chakotay feels her fingers against his chest and realizes that she’s unbuttoning his shirt, or at least trying. He doesn’t want to take his hands off her, though, and breaks away from her lips only long enough to kiss his way down her neck—and what a revelation, to do this without concern for the consequences. Kathryn arches her neck into his kisses, tilts her head to bare her neck so that he can go further, bite a little at the shape of her collarbone before kissing back up her throat to find her mouth again.
A button pops off his shirt and Kathryn shoves the shirt open further, down his shoulders, pulls back and says “Sorry—” before he occupies her mouth. He jolts at the feeling of her hands against his bare chest as she strokes her hands over his skin, roaming from his shoulders across his nipples and one hand along his side. The other hand slides further down, down until her fingers find their way to the skin beneath the waist of his pants. She pulls her hand out, grabs the buckle of his belt and tugs him firmly against her and he feels like he’s going to climb out of his skin with wanting her. When she starts to unbuckle the belt, he gasps in a sharp breath and grabs her thighs through the thin fabric of her dress; she spreads her legs wider as she finishes unbuckling his belt and drags it out of the belt loops. He finds himself pulling her dress higher up her legs, high enough that he can get his hands on her bare skin and feels her react.
“Wait, wait,” he says thickly. “Not on the table.” He sees the understanding in Kathryn’s eyes, that he doesn’t want this to be like the other times they’ve found the nearest flat surface, and somehow he forces himself to step back.
Kathryn slides down from the table and she’s breathing fast. “The bed is this way,” she says, and leads him through the doors to her bedroom. Another time, he might look around to see what she’s chosen to keep closest to her, but not this time, not when she turns her back to him and says, “Help me with the zipper?”
He gathers her hair in one hand, lays it over her shoulder out of the way, and finds the tiny zipper to unfasten her dress. He takes his time, laying a hot kiss on each new inch of exposed skin to make her shiver, undoes the clasp on her bra when he reaches it, until the dress is fully open and it falls away in front of her. When she starts to turn, he pulls her back against his chest and wraps one arm around her, brushes his fingers lightly across a nipple, back and forth, almost teasing. He slides his other hand slowly, so slowly, into the front of her underwear, down through the coarse hair until he can lay a finger softly on her clit and keep it there, unmoving. “Do you know how long I’ve wanted to do this and know you’ll still be here afterward?” He breathes the words into her ear and she shivers again, tries to buck against his finger to get any friction at all. When he moves his finger with her, she rubs back against his cock instead, still trapped in his pants.
“I’ve always wanted it,” she admits, and her voice is very soft. “It just took me a while to accept it.” She takes his fingers from her nipple and sucks them into her mouth the way she did in the kitchen weeks ago, tongue curling around his fingertips and tracing the space between his fingers, and he wants to drag his pants down so that he can feel her hot skin on his cock, but he’s unwilling to take his finger off her clit. He lets her have a little friction—not enough to come, he wants to see her face when she does, but enough that she gasps and sucks harder at his fingers before moving his hand back to her breast and using her own fingers to close his around her nipple, wet and harder than before. “You’re going to kill me.” She reaches back and grips his hips.
“Kathryn,” and it’s almost a plea now. She hooks her fingers in his waistband and works his pants and underwear down in short tugs, just low enough to free his cock. He jerks forward almost automatically at the sudden change, the head of his cock slipping against her underwear just where he would want to be. It would be easy, so easy, to pull her underwear to the side and push inside her—he knows how wet she is, can feel her trembling with want against him. “On the bed,” he says, and releases her. The loss of contact is worth it for the sight of her sprawled on the bed, underwear skimmed off and thrown to one side. “Tell me what you want,” he says, and it was never the gas or the pollen or the paint that made him offer her anything, anything she wants.
“Come here.” They tangle together on the bed for a moment, skin on skin, him seeking her mouth with his own, until she wins and pushes him onto his back. “Stay here,” she says, and her smile is blinding, wicked, as though he could ever disobey her. Kathryn slides down his body slowly until she reaches his hips. His cock bumps against her lips and her tongue darts out to lick the little bit of wetness that he’s left there. Chakotay groans and before he can move, Kathryn has pinned his hips to the bed. That’s when she sucks his cock into her mouth and it’s good that she’s holding him down because the only thing in his mind is to get deeper into that wet heat as she bobs her head up and down. He fists his hands in the sheets to keep from grabbing her hair, especially when she takes his cock deep and then stops moving, looks up his body and sees him watching her; she holds his gaze and flutters her tongue under the head of his cock.
His entire body tightens and he gasps, “Not going to—last if—” Kathryn holds his cock in place as she pulls off, mouths wetly at the head a few more time until he gasps again and very nearly comes, and then she stops. “Please—”
She climbs up his body again and kisses him, deep and hard, as she positions herself above his cock. He’s desperate to be back inside her, but she lowers herself only enough to take the tip of his cock inside, then lift up, over and over, and he won’t come from this but how he wants to. He thrusts up almost frantically every time, until without warning she does slide all the way down on his cock. Kathryn throws her head back and moans at the feeling and he’s losing all conscious thought but he wants her to come like this, when he’s buried inside her. She rides him like that, hips rolling, taking him as deep as she can get him, and he’s so close to coming when she says “Don’t you dare come without me” and he has to reach down to grip the base of his cock tightly. Now every stroke rubs her clit against his knuckles and she’s gasping, he can feel her tightening around him. He lets go just as she comes hard around him, grabs her hips to hold her in place as she draws it out of him and he comes with her.
Kathryn stays like that, keeps him inside her. He has barely enough coherence to press his fingers to her clit again, work at it until she contracts around him again and cries out and then more or less collapses on his chest. They breathe together, hearts beating, for a long time. Then Kathryn mouths what might be a kiss on his chest and rolls off him onto the nearby space on the sheets. “At least we made it most of the way onto the bed,” she says. The blood is still pounding through Chakotay—he feels like he’s been running for hours—but he’s aware enough to realize that they’re lying perpendicular to the bed.
“Next time.” That’s about as much as he can manage to say right now.
“Do you want the first shower?”
It’s a mystery to Chakotay how she can string together this many words. “You go,” he says. He loses track of time lying there and is startled when Kathryn reappears, clean and in some kind of nightgown. He nods, gets up, and stumbles to the sonic shower, has to turn it down to its lowest setting because every inch of his skin feels hyper-sensitive right now. When he comes out of the shower, Kathryn has stripped the bed and is holding a stack of clean sheets. “Were we that bad?”
She looks a little embarrassed. “Only a little. But I thought it would be—nice. To make the bed together. If you’re going to stay here.”
“I’ll stay until you get sick of me,” he says honestly. Kathryn smiles a silly little smile and he loves it, loves her, loves that this is what she wants to do. She unfolds the bottom sheet and flaps it a little at him until he catches one side and stretches it out across the bed. “I should warn you, I used to get in trouble at the Academy for how I made my bed.”
“Oh?” She’s already tucking the corners perfectly into place. “That’s how my father insisted I make my bed when I was growing up.”
“I thought it was a waste of time, worrying about how I made my bed, whether my boots were polished, that kind of thing. I was very resentful.” He matches her corners anyway, and she unfolds the flat sheet. “I collected a lot of demerits before I learned to stop fighting every little thing so hard.” He helps her arrange it properly and then spread the top blanket across the bed.
Kathryn picks up one of the pillows and plumps it a little, then drops it back into place. “Do you have a side?”
It takes him a minute to realize she means of the bed. “Not really. I usually just sleep in the center.” He tries to remember which side he preferred a long time ago, the last time he regularly shared a bed with someone. “Left, I think. You?”
She smiles wryly. “Left.”
“Ah, then I’ve just realized, I always preferred the right side.” It’s an easy thing to say and it makes her laugh. They get into bed on the sides they’ve claimed and he finds that she’s lying on her side just looking at him. He rolls to face her. “You’re smiling an awful lot for someone trapped in a quadrant full of people and—and space oddities trying to kill us.”
Kathryn makes a show of trying to look more solemn before her face breaks into a smile again. “I blame my first officer,” she says.
“Oh?”
“Well, I’m in love with him.”
There’s an entirely pleasant ringing in his ears. He moves closer, until their foreheads are almost touching. “He’s in love with you too.” He’s smiling so broadly that it’s hard to shape his lips properly for a kiss. Somehow he manages it.
Kathryn snuggles closer to him and tucks her head under his chin. “I should warn you, I’m not a morning person.”
He can feel her breath as she says it, and he wraps his arm around her to hold her close. “I’ll have the coffee ready.”
Chakotay has almost drifted off to sleep when Kathryn says, “Oh no!” Before he can leap out of bed and try to find a phaser, she adds, “I forgot about dinner!”
He laughs against her hair. “From now on, I’m in charge of the meals.”
Kathryn murmurs, “For the rest of our lives you’re in charge of the meals.”
“For the rest of our lives,” he agrees. “Hopefully a very long time.”