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Of all the things Gemma missed at Lumon, hot water has to be near the top of the list.
Her showers were carefully controlled, as every other aspect of her life was down there: only five minutes to avoid wasting water, cold but not freezing since that was supposed to be healthier. You never realized how much you valued the little things until they were forcibly ripped away from you.
Even now, with some time between her and her bolt from Lumon, Gemma takes nothing for granted. Even this, the smallest assertion of autonomy: a hot shower, taking her time as she soaps herself.
When she steps out to look for her pants, Mark is awake, sitting on the bed in the warm slant of dawn light. His eyes are bloodshot – he was up last night with a nightmare – but he smiles at her. He has that slightly dumbstruck look about him whenever he lays eyes on her, like he still can’t believe she’s here. Gemma can relate.
She sprawls across the bed to kiss him and Mark responds eagerly, his hand coming up to cup her jaw. Neither of them has brushed their teeth yet, but gross breath is one of those things you become accustomed to with years of marriage, and his pleased hum when she deepens the kiss makes up for it.
“Mmm, morning,” Mark murmurs when they separate.
“Morning.” Gemma moves her attention to his jaw, trailing kisses down his neck. “It’s early, you should try to go back to sleep.”
Mark arches his head back, exposing his throat to her, and it immediately becomes clear than neither of them is leaving this bed anytime soon. “Well, you know what helps with sleep . . .” He leaves the implication hanging.
“I think you just made that up,” Gemma retorts between kisses. Her mouth finds his pulse, and Mark moans softly. “Do you have a source on that?”
“Sure, I read it in SciAm,” Mark deadpans. He pulls her up into a hungry kiss, Gemma nipping lightly at his lower lip until he leans away again. “Are you sure you want to . . . ?”
“I’m okay,” Gemma says. They have only had sex a handful of times since they were thrown back together – gentle, needy sex that usually ended in one or both of them crying – but Mark always checks in on her to the point of fretting, asking Are you sure? or Is this okay? even if Gemma is the one initiating. His concern is sweet but a little frustrating, especially right now, when desire has descended upon her.
Gemma is only in a T-shirt and panties, so it does not take long for Mark to get her out of her clothes, until she is naked and straddling him. She can feel him hard under her and teasingly grinds against him for a moment, making Mark groan loudly into her mouth. She almost forgot, down there, how damn noisy he could be in bed, despite his best efforts to conceal it.
Mark gets his hands under her legs and helps maneuver her so she is lying against the pillows, his head between her thighs. She can feel his breath, hot against her cunt, and she tightens a hand in his hair.
“You look so good down there, honey,” Gemma murmurs, petting his hair. His eyes flick up to meet hers: blown wide, pupils swallowing his irises. “Just don’t make me wait.”
She feels more than sees him smile, and then his mouth presses against her, lapping at her. Gemma groans, lifting her hips up to meet him. He’s going at a slow pace, like he’s trying to savor it, taking her clit into his mouth only for a moment before he returns to the same flat strokes of his tongue. It’s driving her crazy; it feels amazing, but it’s not enough to make her come, and she’s too pent-up to wait out her climax for long.
“Mark,” she pants.
Mark’s head pops back up. “Should I keep going, baby?”
“Yes, fuck, of course you should. Stop being such a tease.”
“A tease?” Mark repeats faux innocently.
Gemma rolls her eyes. “Nice try.” She winds her fingers in his hair in the way she knows he loves, and he predictably melts into her. “C’mon, you want to make me feel good, don’t you?”
“Yeah, God, yeah,” Mark gasps, and he doesn’t resist when she pulls him back down, using his hair to steer him. He redoubles his efforts after that, lavishing attention on her clit – he still knows exactly how to coax her to the brink – and Gemma feels herself arch off the bed to meet him, taking what she needs from him.
She can’t stop her hips from bucking as her orgasm washes over her. Mark laps at her through it, determinedly licking her until she starts to shiver from overstimulation and has to pull him off.
“Good boy,” Gemma says, stroking his hair. She tries to catch her breath. “Jesus.”
Mark gives her a dazed look. His mouth and chin are soaked, both from her wetness and his own spit. He’s catching his breath too, rests his cheek against her thigh for a few moments. When Gemma cups his cheek, guiding him to look back up at her, his eyes are glassy but adoring in a way that warms her. He’s here, she’s here, everything is a miracle.
It also sends blood rushing to her cunt again.
Gemma ignores that for now, stroking Mark’s cheekbone with her thumb as he nuzzles into her. “Come up here?”
Mark slides up the bed, pausing only to wriggle out of his boxers – Gemma notices with satisfaction the wet spot soaked through the fabric, his swollen cock – and fling them somewhere. He peppers her face with kisses until Gemma is giggling from the tickling sensation and lightly pushing him away.
“Stay there,” Gemma half-asks, half-orders as she moves down the bed.
“What are you –?” Mark begins, but then Gemma ducks down and hooks her hands around his thighs, and he gets the message. “Ohhh, fuck –”
Gemma doesn’t do this much. To be honest, she’s never been crazy about blowjobs, but she wants to now. Especially with the way Mark is staring at her, a captive audience, eyes hooded and a pink flush all the way down to his chest, the lovely way his whole body shudders when she laves over the tip of his cock.
“Keep your hands on the bed, okay?” Gemma tells him, and Mark nods, already fisting the bedsheets to have something to hold on to. It gives Gemma a funny ache inside, knowing that when she takes him in her mouth, she is not giving up control. It’s a gentle sort of control, though, something knowing and tender, so far from the silent threat of cameras following you or a door that locks from the outside.
Gemma languidly swallows around him, moving back to roll her tongue over his cockhead. Every tiny movement she makes causes Mark to tense and jerk around, leaking precum. At some point, he puts his hand between his teeth to stifle his moans.
Gemma offers him her own hand instead, and he responds eagerly, taking two fingers into his mouth. She has to stifle a moan at the velvet warmth of his mouth, the barest suggestion of teeth as he swallows around her fingers. Once she’s sure that he’s gotten her fingers suitably wet, she pulls her hand away, a string of saliva still connecting them. She returns her attention to his cock, sliding her tongue beneath his cockhead in the way she knows she loves.
As she does, she uses her hand to encourage Mark to bend his knees as her free hand slides beneath him. When her fingers find his hole, he gasps, his cock pulsing in her mouth, and Gemma is encouraged to circle his hole with the slick pad of her thumb, smearing his own saliva. Just testing, waiting for him to loosen up. She is far more patient than him.
“Please, Gem, I need –” Mark whines, and Gemma gives him what he’s asking for, pressing her thumb into him. Her stomach twists with lust as she does so, Jesus Christ, he’s so fucking hot inside, he’s practically sucking her in –
The twin sensations are clearly too much for Mark to last through, but Gemma waits for him to warn her. She wants to see him break apart, here, where it’s safe; she wants him to feel the pressure of her mouth around him and her thumb pressing deep inside him.
“Gemma, I’m –”
Gemma hums knowingly, and the vibrations make Mark buck. “Fuck, if you keep doing that – I’m – I can’t last much longer –”
Gemma pulls away before he can come, and Mark whines in disappointment. “That’s flattering, baby.” Teasingly, she adds, “Only one finger? That’s all it took?”
“It wasn’t only one finger,” Mark protests, propping up on his elbows, horniness momentarily overtaken by the indignant need to defend his case. “You literally had my cock in your mouth. And, technically, it wasn’t a finger, it was your thumb.”
“A thumb is a finger.”
“Not exactly,” Mark argues. “It’s different, or they wouldn’t have a separate name for it. You can’t equate thumbs with fingers. They only have two joints instead of three, right?”
“It’s probably an etymological thing,” Gemma muses, then, abruptly refocusing, “Oh, my God, what are we even talking about?”
“I’m just defending myself,” Mark says pedantically.
Gemma scoffs. “Okay, then. You want to keep debating this, or would you rather shelve it for now and just fuck me?”
“Hmm, I gotta choose Option B, in that case,” Mark says, leaning down to kiss her. The kiss tastes weird: spit and salt, tasting themselves on the other’s lips, but it’s also unbearably hot.
Gemma moves to straddle Mark on the bed, his big warm hands steadying her as she lines his cock up and sinks down onto him. She has only just begun to move, though, a gentle rocking motion, when she hears a thump from somewhere inside the house and freezes.
They both pause, straining to listen, and Gemma relaxes when she hears the distinct sound of Ricken talking, probably on the phone. This is the issue with staying over in Devon and Ricken’s spare room: not a lot of privacy, especially since Ricken is prone to busting into the room with no warning.
“He can’t hear us, can he?” Mark whispers.
“He’d only be able to hear you,” Gemma says, and punctuates her point with a thrust of her hips that makes Mark moan wantonly. “Can you stay quiet?”
Mark grumbles something – he still gets embarrassed when she points out his noisiness in bed – but an idea pops into Gemma’s head. She leans forward, making them both tense and gasp at the feeling, and retrieves her panties from where they ended up on the other side of the bed. She holds them aloft, watches amusedly as Mark zeroes in on them, immediately catching on to her plan.
“Open your mouth,” Gemma orders gently. “I’ll give you some help with keeping quiet.”
Mark looks half-drunk, wordless. He parts his lips and Gemma carefully stuffs her panties into his mouth, watches his jaw tighten around them. He could spit them out if he wanted to, but she trusts that he’ll keep them in until the end.
Gemma sets a quick pace, rising and falling, finding that perfect spot that makes fireworks explode behind her eyes when his cock hits it. As she fucks herself on him, Mark makes muffled whines around his gag, eyes squeezed shut, sweat sticking his hair to his forehead. He’s clutching desperately at her hips still, to anchor her, or himself, or maybe the both of them.
It means more than words can express for Gemma to see Mark like this. Something she thought she would never have again, in that sterile purgatory. They don’t have to survive off scraps of memory, they don’t have to be afraid. This is it. This can be it, here, in these sweat-damp sheets, bathed in the pink-gold morning light.
Mark won’t last long now, she can see it in his furrowed brows, the wetness of his eyes. Gemma won’t either. There’s no need to deny themselves now, though.
She takes the panties out of his mouth as she starts to feel that coiling in her gut. “Talk to me, sweetheart, you’re doing so well, I want to hear you. Are you gonna come with me?”
“Fuck, yes, yes,” Mark gasps, close to tears. “I’m gonna do it for you – I want – Jesus, Gemma, you’re driving me crazy –”
He pushes himself up, wrapping his arms properly around her, and the new angle throws Gemma into her second orgasm, waves of pleasure capsizing her. Mark follows her only a second later, hot and spasmodic inside her, muffling his cry into her shoulder.
She can feel his heart thumping wildly against her, her own heartbeat singing in her ears. Proof of life.
When they finally separate, pulling away wet and gentle as she murmurs praise to him, they collapse back onto the bed, boneless and entwined. His hand finds hers, playing with her fingers, tracing patterns.
“You think Ricken heard us?”
“I hope to God he didn’t,” Mark says, grimacing. “I wouldn’t be able to look him in the eye again if he did.” He pulls her closer to him. “We’d have to leave the country.”
“I hear the Arctic is nice this time of year.”
“Yeah?”
“Oh, yeah. Zero degrees and fjords. You’d love it.”
Mark seems too sleepy to banter back. “Wherever you want, baby,” he mumbles into her hair.
Wherever you want. Maybe that’s the secret. Maybe she could live anywhere in the world, and so long as she had this – Mark’s heartbeat and his arms around her – it would be home.