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bittermuire · 3 months

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This is like if rhysta was a horror novel and the horror was actually a love story and the love story was actually about grief and self-hatred and the grief was actually a terrific love and fear for yourself and your body and anyways what I'm trying to say is that this is incredible and everyone should read it immediately

Wild Things

Summary:

Some Nesta x Rhysand for day 7 of @sjmromanceweek !

Devour me, he used to urge her. Devour me, Nesta.

I love you so.

Devour me.

She would nip at the tips of his fingers in play, pretending to be a little feral thing. And he would pretend not to see the wildness in her eyes and dripping from her hair and glinting off her canines when she smiled one of her rare open-mouthed smiles.

(AKA, the toxic Nesta x Rhys fic that has been rattling around in my brain for months)

Chapters: 1/1

Read on AO3

November 11th. The first snow of the year numbs Velaris like novacane.

White snow, white sky, white salt on the roads. Clean and blank and pure for a new year—her twenty-fourth, as of sometime mid-morning. Upon waking, shivering under her dove-grey duvet, Nesta thinks: twenty-four is the year of not fucking things up.

The kitchen is the fire to her hearth. The spray of small yellow rosebuds in a vase on the island, Gwyn’s flame-lick of hair, Emerie’s embrace, the round smiles that fill their cheeks, the pastry waiting at her seat in a white bag, spots translucent with grease. It’s all warm. it all makes her blood move, down to her fingertips, where they prickle with feeling.

***

Want is a funny thing. The question—what do you want?—I want, I want, I want, like a black hole eating the stars. Nesta wants a lot of things: to be warm, awake, clean and untouched like the snow on her bedroom windowsill.

Emerie and Gwyn had asked her months ago what she wanted to do today—today, she has some extra measure of choice, today she’s allowed to want a little harder.

Today, Nesta wants to read and she wants to dance. And she wants—

No. No. So they tuck their feet up on the couch and pile on the blankets and Emerie makes her hot chocolate just the way Nesta likes it and the next few hours are pages whispering as they are turned, steam rising from half-empty mugs, snow curling down outside the window.

***

It had ended just how it had started: cold wind whipping off the Sidra to slice their cheeks wide open. The first time, it made their mouths split into smiles; the last, into trebuchets of hurt. Neither of them is good at pulling punches. His coat was on her shoulders. He said something, then she, and it was suddenly a vile thing on her skin; she ripped it away and threw it down onto the rain-soaked cobblestones. She didn’t throw it over the bridge, into the river, because that would have been irreversible, but now, now, she wishes she had.

That was September, the last long day before time jumped back and the evenings stopped clinging to the sun.

You’re fucking mine, Nesta.

I’m fucking gone.

She doesn’t think about it. She ruined everything, and it didn’t matter, and she doesn’t think about it.

***

Anyways, she’s good at being fine. She’s twenty-four now and she’s going to be fine forever, starting now. Gwyn has a carefully curated getting-ready playlist blasting from her speaker as she curls her hair. Emerie bites her lip as she draws eyeliner across her lid. Nesta sips from a wine bottle as she stares at her jewelry box: there are the little pearl-drop earrings he gave her when they went to Adriata for a weekend in August. I know you already have a favorite pair of earrings, but I thought these could be nice for the Patron’s Gala, maybe. If you like them.

Nesta fishes them out of the drawer and puts them in. She looks at herself in the mirror until her eyes turn red, and then she drops them back in the jewelry box, and stabs large silver hoops through her ears instead.

She turns off the light in her room and goes to the kitchen. Carefully, she pours the rest of the bottle of wine into a plastic Mountain Dew bottle, sucking the spilled drops from her fingers like it’s precious, and not a fourteen-dollar bottle. She plucks her coat off the hook and her keys from the dish by the door.

The three of them are laughing and chattering as they leave the apartment; Gwyn threatens to buy her a birthday girl sash, Emerie says, I think it’s too late for that, Gwyn says, The party store on East 12th is open until 11, I checked. Nesta says, I will strangle you with your own sash if you even think about it. They only laugh at her threat, and she can’t keep her face from smiling, and it doesn’t even bother her when the snow at the curb smears over her boots. She’s untouched. She’s new. She’s only started learning how to live.

***

It doesn’t really matter how it ended. There one minute and gone the next. He was there and gone, there and gone, like seasons, like purity, like the flash of a camera imprinted on the back of your retinas, there, and there, and there, and gone.

So he’s gone. And good riddance.

She used to like to hold his hand. Liked the strong, slim bones of his fingers, the veins that crawled up the back of his hand; liked running her fingers over the scar on the knuckle of his ring finger. He had a freckle on the inside of his left wrist, too, one she liked to press her lips to. I love you so, she would whisper. I’ll eat you whole.

Devour me, he used to urge her. Devour me, Nesta.

I love you so.

Devour me.

***

They step inside the club and check in their coats and the music is so heavy she can feel it pressing right through her muscles and into her bones. She tips her head back. Her spine is one long bass note. Yes, yes, yes.

Bodies shift around her, swaying like stalks of kelp in a western current, and she, an otter twisting among them as she dances. Sleek and warm and with only one wild and carnal drive: hunger.

She wants to devour this scene. The red lights. The upward-reaching limbs. The abandon. The singing mouths, the smell of vodka, the smell of perfume and cologne that surges when pressed too closely among the others.

“11:11,” says Gwyn, not long after they arrive. “Make a wish.”

You already know what she wishes for.

Emerie hands her a shot instead of a birthday candle. It sears her throat and then lights her aflame and she throws herself back into dancing and dancing and oh, when she tilts her head back like this, baring her throat, she feels knifelike and untouchable and violent, like she could strangle the whole world in her fists.

She imagines it. Sinking her teeth in. Getting the snow banks messy. Starting everything over so she doesn’t have to make so many mistakes this time. Sometimes, when Nesta buys a new book, she’ll bring it on the train and accidentally bend a corner when she goes to shove it in her bag in her haste to get off at her stop. Later, she’ll look at the crease, run her finger over it as if she can smooth it away, and fight the urge to buy a whole new copy—one she hasn’t irrevocably marred. She never does buy a new one; she knows, on some level, that it’s ridiculous to even consider it.

No creases this year, she reminds herself. She’s drunk now. Half of her blood is vodka. The music goes even louder, like a reminder or a threat. Emerie is grinding up against a striking blonde girl now; Gwyn is making eyes at someone across the room, sweeping her hair off her collarbones like a challenge; Nesta feels a drop of sweat run down her temples and sucks more swollen air into her lungs, her body greedy for it in the club’s heat.

All the lights go gas-flame blue, and that’s when she sees him.

***

So it ended. Fine. But it had started once, too.

Nesta had been in ballet as a child—no surprise, considering her family: upper class in a pearl-necklaces-and-endive-salads way. Everything was satin slippers and hair slicked back too tightly into unforgiving buns, until her mother died when she was fifteen and her father didn’t care enough to make her continue taking classes. It left her with a lithe body, a hatred of the Nutcracker, and a severe case of perfectionism.

Her favorite show to dance had been Sleeping Beauty, so last winter, when she heard the Velaris Ballet was showing it, she went to see it twice. Once, with Gwyn and Emerie, and again with Elain, except Elain canceled last-minute and Nesta thought about canceling both their tickets and staying home, but didn’t.

So, of course. He picked up Elain’s ticket.

During the show, she could drink up the colorful dresses, the masterful dancing, the beautiful shapes the dancers’ bodies made as they moved gently across the stage. When intermission came, she had no such distraction. There was only the stranger sitting next to her in his night-black suit, and of course he was devastatingly beautiful, how could she not notice? Admiring him was inexorable.

She caught him admiring her right back—those dark blue eyes making a steady, unapologetic map of her face.

It happened in textbook steps, alarming in its simplicity, really: He introduced himself. They talked throughout the rest of intermission. At some point during the third act, his knee made its way to press against hers, and he didn’t pull it away, and she didn’t pull away, either. When the lights flooded back on, the spell broke, or maybe it was cast?, and he asked her if she’d like to see the Balanchine performance with him the following week, and she wrote her number on the back of his hand with a sharpie she’d found in her purse. He had beautiful hands, like a piano player, and she asked if he played, and he said Tchaikovsky was his favorite to play, it was why he liked coming to the ballet.

Several weeks later, she would lie with her head in his lap, those nimble fingers combing through her hair, and ask, Play for me?, and he would, and it would become her favorite sound. And after that, she would sometimes sit on the edge of the bench, or kneel beside it, or stand behind him as he played, and close her eyes and imagine herself moving to the sound. Pas de bourré, pirouette.

But not yet. That would come later.

***

She sees him and the world keeps moving, even though she feels like it shouldn’t. She sees him and the world doesn’t end. It should. It doesn’t.

A current of blue bodies around her. He swims right through them. She doesn’t look at Gwyn or Emerie when he reaches her because she doesn’t have to see their faces to know their reproach.

She’s been locked into those stunning eyes since she first caught them; in this blue light, they are so, so dark, like midnight, and just as devastating. And they devastate her, they do.

Nesta thinks, You can’t unruin this. She thinks it so loudly that there’s no way he doesn’t hear it. But he doesn’t say anything. He doesn’t have to. He just looks at her, and she just looks at him, and, light with drink, she sways with the other kelp, sways right into him.

She can smell the alcohol on his breath. He’s holding a drink—a gin and tonic. He always liked gin. Elderflower gin, something that sounded fairy-like and ancient, something that smelled divine and didn’t hurt going down. She takes the cup from his hand and downs half. It’s cheap; burns like hell. He takes it back. Holds her stare as he drinks down the rest and drops the cup on the nearest flat surface.

He’s already drunk; she can tell because his face is a little too devastated when he looks at her.

His hands on her waist. Her waist in his hands. His hips pressed to her stomach. Her stomach burning gas-flame blue.

Nesta, he mouths. His eyes drop to her lips. His forehead drops to touch her own, as if he could press a feeling straight from his mind into hers.

Don’t, she says. Or maybe she thinks it.

He kisses her.

She kisses him back.

It’s inevitable, after that.

Gwyn and Emerie don’t even bother to stop her. They know better. He leads her downstairs, to the front of the club. She collects her coat. She follows him out onto the snow-driven street. A fresh coat has fallen since she and her friends went inside those few hours ago. It makes her think of new slates and starting over.

It makes her think of the way her boots crush the powdery snowflakes to grey slush.

You can’t unruin this.

He lives close—close enough that they can’t justify anything other than walking. She doesn’t look over at him and he doesn’t take her hand as they walk, and it’s almost as if they’re colleagues, with this space between them. Space enough for her ghosting breaths to dissipate entirely before they could ever reach his face.

And then—the bridge. The quay. Inevitable, she knew it, knew they’d have to cross the slushy Sidra, but. But.

She can feel him looking at her.

They reach the middle of the bridge, and she can’t keep going anymore. She’s shaking, knees knocking together embarrassingly, like a child. Nesta stops and she turns and she looks at the snow on the bridge and hates it for how serene it seems.

“I missed you, Nesta,” he says.

Past tense. He doesn’t anymore. He has her now, is what he means. He won't let go again, not like last time.

“Are you cold?” he asks. “Do you want my coat?”

She bites her lip and shakes her head, still looking down at the snow. His shoes scuff the snow as he steps closer. He takes her in his arms and he is just as warm and comforting and safe as he ever was, and it makes her want to cry, but she doesn’t. She does let him hold her. Even though it makes everything worse.

Rhys tilts up her chin and she keeps her eyes closed. He kisses her, so gently at first that she shudders, and then her mouth opens to him like a rose, and she presses harder into him, and he isn’t gentle anymore.

Her lips, cracked from the cold, split and bleed when he bites into them, and their kisses change to copper.

***

Nesta threw up before their first date. She stood in front of her mirror, trying to like the grey dress she was wearing, but she started thinking that maybe a dress was too much, and then she envisioned herself sitting stiffly next to the man—Rhysand—for the whole two and a half hours, not looking at him, and the thought—the thought of the awkwardness made her physically ill. He wouldn’t like her anymore, and then she would never be able to go to the ballet again, and and and—

She threw up neatly into the toilet, flushed it, brushed her teeth, and left.

By the time she was walking up the steps to the theater, she was trembling like a fawn, but she needn’t have worried. He was charming—his hand holding the door for her, his hand steering her respectfully from the small of her back, his hand alighting on her knee during intermission and lingering there, light and steady, until the lights began to dim again and he pulled it away.

The second half of the performance, she watched him. The way his breath caught at the crescendo of a number. The way his fingers tapped on his thighs in time with the notes. The way the bare light that reached them from the stage cast a glowing outline around the beautiful parts of his face, which seemed to be all of them.

The ballet ended, and he invited her to get a late-night coffee; he knew a cafe, one run by real Italians, so she should know it was good. By midnight, she’d made him laugh so hard he’d choked on a sip of his cappuccino, and he had made her feel coltish and new and brilliant, and finally, entirely at ease.

He was always very good with prey.

***

Nesta isn’t prey. She has a mouth full of teeth and she uses them. He’d do well to remember that, for fuck’s sake.

She bites down too hard and Rhys makes a noise in his throat. She pushes him away and they stand there, panting, staring at each other.

“Nesta,” he says.

They stand on the bridge. The snow numbs sound, numbs hurt, numbs everything.

“Come home with me, Nesta,” he says.

She goes home with him.

***

He loved her too hard. Maybe that was the problem.

Rhys wasn’t clingy, desperate—nothing so plebian as that. It was more authoritative. More intense, like a bruise. He always, always wanted her. Sex, of course, but more than that.

When it was sex, it was hungry. It was always too much, and it was never enough. It hurt every time, but it was never painful. There was sweat and tangled hair and open mouths and tenderness, always, and gentleness, only sometimes, only after. His hands were always tight around some part of her flesh, as if he were afraid she’d disappear the moment he let go, as if he could have more of her if he held more tightly.

She could never stop herself from sinking her teeth in, anyways. His shoulder, his neck, his arms, his side. She’d never made a habit of it before. It was something primal only he could bring out in her.

When it wasn’t sex, it was a different kind of want. Uncontainable, devastating. He wanted her like it hurt him. Sometimes she wasn’t even sure if he liked her. He just wanted her.

One hot day that summer: billowing, gauzy curtains, Nesta in those lavender sleep shorts he liked so much, the hair around Rhys’s temples curling with sweat. Still, he held her close against him as they lay on the couch, her stomach to his stomach, her chest to his chest, her chin tucked against his shoulder.

Nesta asked, “Why did you ask me out that day at the ballet?”

His arm banded around her more tightly. He said, “I liked the way you watched them. Hungrily. I wanted to make you look at me like that.”

***

They step inside Rhys’s townhouse and the familiar smell hits her like a truck. It’s just the smell of a home—a home he’s lived in. Recently, without her. She wonders if his coffee machine still refuses to work unless he thumps the side of it as it gets going. She wonders if he ever got around to replacing the batteries in his TV remote. She wonders how many other women he’s brought here since everything ended. Maybe he fucks them in their own houses. Maybe he brings them here, has them on the couch, pushes the dove-grey pillows to the floor to make room for their bodies. She can’t imagine him fucking them in his bed, or she’ll throw up right here on his doormat.

The door clicks behind her, shutting out the cold. The air inside is warm and still, waiting for something. His hand touches her waist, moves her until her back is against the wall, and she thinks this is it, this is the part where he kisses her and takes her apart—but not yet.

Rhys kneels on the floor, takes her calf in his hands and slips off her boots, one by one, setting her feet down gently as if she were a child, or a queen. Something precious and vulnerable.

His soft fingers, piano-player’s fingers, trail up her body as he rises, hitching her dress up with them. She knows how this ends and it hurts. He kisses her wet cheekbones, one and the other.

“Nesta,” he says. He kisses her lips and she tastes salt.

She sinks her hands into the hair at the nape of his neck and pulls him closer.

Their kisses get harder, serious. She hitches her leg around his hips, presses into him—his beautiful fingers are everywhere. They tangle in her hair and pull her head back so he can better lick her throat. They count her ribs, looking for a way in. They move over her hips, down, cleverly stroking the wet seam of her underwear, starting out gentle, just how he knows she likes it.

She reaches for his belt. She wonders, where will he have her? Will he bring her to the couch? Will he have her right here, against the wall? Will he take her back to his bed, or would that mean to much?

Rhys shudders into her touch, eyes rolling back. His mouth is saying things like Fuck, Nesta, I missed you, yes, harder, more, Nesta, Nesta, Nesta—

He chokes on his own breaths and pulls her hands away. With a few tugs, her dress is over her head, and he sinks to his knees again. She looks off to the side, towards the door, not wanting to face the way he looks up at her. Devotion poisoned by possession. His hands are hot on the backs of her thighs.

“Look at me, Nesta,” he orders. He pulls her underwear away—embarrassingly wet. The expression that flits across his face then—it’s a bit too relieved to be a smirk, but close.

She puts her hands into the silky onyx strands before her.

“Eat, then,” she says, unkindly.

He does. Like it’s the only thing he’s ever wanted to do. Like he’s afraid she’ll stop him, take it away from him. She wishes she would, but she doesn’t. She’s too weak to give up something this good. Something that feels so inevitable—what’s the use?

Nesta comes right there, silently, except for one gasping breath that she immediately stifles. It’s horrible, it’s so, so horrible, how badly she misses him in that moment. It hits her, a pain so sharp she nearly flinches. It’s so horrible. So obvious, how he’s ruined her.

A tug on the backs of her knees, and her body falls obediently to straddle him where he kneels on the floor, her lips coming to meet his, hungrily taking the taste of herself from his tongue. He pulls her back, back, until he’s lying flat on the floor of the hallway, and she’s sitting over him, fumbling to yank off his shirt, to shove down his pants. Her body remembers how to move with him, remembers the steps to this. It remembers, even if her mind feels heavy and watered-down.

There is a bright spark of pain as she sinks down onto him. Rhys looks up at her from the floor. His eyes glint like a country sky at night, his sin-dark hair splays across the floor like a sunburst, his mouth parts like submission.

Nesta takes his throat in her hands and squeezes. “I hate you,” she tells him, and he lets her. Her knees press into the hardwood. He jerks his hips up with a groan. She says, “I hate you, Rhys.”

She feels a tightness in her throat that means tears. She won’t cry. She lets go of his neck and bites into her palm to hold them at bay. She won’t cry, she won’t cry. Her fingerprints fade whitely from his skin.

Rhys flips them over and settles his body over hers, between her knees. He fits in her body like he’s made for her. Her head fits just so in the space between his neck and his shoulder. She breathes him in through her nose, out through her mouth, as he begins to fuck her. He had always smelled so good, like something she shouldn’t eat. Sweet and rich, with some kind of spicy undertone, like pepper or ginger. Achingly sweet with a stinger.

Rhys takes her hand away from her mouth and pulls her wrists over her head.

“You love me, Nesta, you love me so,” he says. He threads his fingers in between hers. “You love me so.”

***

Nesta closes her eyes as he washes her hair in the shower.

“Nesta,” he says, smoothing soap away from her brow. “Stay.”

She tilts her head up, but doesn’t open her eyes. “You keep saying my name,” she says.

She can feel the sigh come out of his chest. He says, “I’m afraid I’ll forget how it sounds.”

In spite of her will, her body begins to tremble. Anger and fear and rage and desperation all well up at once, and her eyes fly open, lashes dripping under the stream of the shower, and she means to say a hundred things—a hundred accusations and castigations—but only a single word comes out, choked in steam. “Please.”

His face changes into a shape she doesn’t know well. “Nesta,” he breathes, pulling her body into his.

Fuck you, fuck you, fuck you, she thinks. But she lets him towel her dry and brush out her hair and braid it down her back with his nimble fingers, the way she taught him, once. He pulls one of his t-shirts over her head—her favorite one, god, she hates that she has a favorite—and tucks her close to him under the covers. His sheets smell like his detergent and him, and it’s miserable, knowing he’s letting her go after this, even though that’s what she wanted in the first place. Catch and release. You can’t uncrease a paperback cover. You can only buy a whole new book.

God. Twenty-four hours as a twenty-four year old and she’s already fucked everything up. She’s already let him ruin her.

They lie there in his bed in his sheets in his townhouse on the river. She’s still drunk. She’s still here. His heart is still beating just a few ribs away from hers. She counts those beats, those bloodier sheep. One-one. One-one. One-one. One-one.

She’s not entirely sure if she’s dreaming when he says it. She hopes she is. She wishes so badly that she is.

I won’t go, he promises into the dark, into the sweet warmth. Just eat me whole.

***

Snow falls overnight.

In the morning, when Nesta looks out Rhys’s window, her eyes hurt to touch anything at all, it’s so bright.

He is behind her, suddenly. His arms come around her, his chest pressing to her back. He fits. It is suddenly, terrifyingly, as if she never left.

“Nesta,” he says, one last time.

She turns in his arms, fitting herself into the crooks of his body. She is real, she is new, she is blinding like the pure fallen snow.

Nesta makes a decision.

“Rhys,” she answers, speaking against his heartbeat.

When she smiles up at him, secretive and small, her ribcage opens up and curls around him like the legs of a spider.

#insane amazing incredible #i was thinking about you the other day and now you're here!! with a life changing fic that I CANNOT STOP THINKING ABOUT

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