However, all efforts at maintaining composure swiftly came to naught when Kylo leaned down and kissed her so savagely it made her head spin.
Oh, Rey thought, her heart skipping a beat like it always did at the initial press of Kylo's soft lips against hers. But he didn't give her time to luxuriate in the sensation— instead, he greedily swept his tongue into her mouth until it felt like less of a kiss and more of a taking, and she would be lying if she said that it didn't make excitement leap within her abdomen like a bonfire fanned by the evening breeze.
And yet they couldn't kiss as deeply as they wanted, not with their heavy, elaborate half-masks in the way. Kylo pulled back and, expecting him to take his off, Rey's hands flew up to her face to follow suit.
"Leave it on," he commanded, his tone imperious and his gaze inscrutable as he made no move to remove his own mask.
"What has gotten into you?" Rey demanded. It wasn't that she wasn't getting turned on— apparently, she was absurd enough to find this princely high-handedness attractive for the challenge it presented— but it was a bit startling.
"I told you," Kylo growled, slipping off his gloves and letting them fall carelessly to the floor, "I don't want to share." He grabbed her by the waist, his bare fingers kneading at the skin of her lower back, causing her spine to erupt into a river of sparks that was exacerbated when he kissed her again, so violently that she wondered if it might leave them both bruised. " Never, do you hear me?" he muttered against her lips. "I never want to share—" He punctuated the breaks in his sentence with one hard kiss after another, each time pulling away before she could kiss him back— "not with that bastard Aleson— not with any of them— I don't care what anyone says—"
Rey's eyes widened as the epiphany struck. She wrenched her mouth from Kylo's so that she could glare up at him. "If you think, for one second," she hissed, "that you can forbid me from dancing with whomever I please—"
His lips curled into a humorless sneer. "I rather doubt dancing was all your fine-feathered suitors had in mind."
"You're preposterous," Rey snapped. "You told me in this very room that this was your problem, not mine, so if you could kindly refrain from getting mad at me—"
"I'm not mad," Kylo interrupted, "I'm jealous—"
"You don't have a reason to be!" she burst out, resisting the impulse to tear at her painstakingly styled hair in frustration. "You're the only one I'll ever—"
And that was when she faltered. Because, the truth was, she couldn't say for sure, could she? Especially in these treacherous circumstances. No one could tell the future. It lay before her like an open pit.
Kylo immediately picked up on her hesitation, flinching as if she'd struck him. And then his shoulders squared with the same steely resolve she'd seen come over him a while ago in this very room, when he'd apologized to her, and before she knew it he was kissing her again— only now it was more focused in its intensity, more calculated, as if he were concentrating on moving his lips and tongue in a manner that would draw out the most primal of reactions from her.
And it worked. Oh, how it worked. Rey moaned into his mouth, the fine material of his doublet crushed between her fingers where they dug into his arms for support as her knees turned to jelly. There was discomfort, though, in how her mask clacked against his, the metalwork pressing into her face, and eventually he broke the kiss and scooped her up into his arms. walking the short distance to the antechamber's sitting area and depositing her onto the handsome, gilded chaise lounge, pushing her down so that she leaned against the cushioned backrest.
Kylo looked like a forest god as he fell to his knees before her, golden antlers gleaming in the light, his large hands hiking up her emerald skirts as he spread her thighs apart. He was no less beautiful when he took off his mask and she had an unobstructed view of his features, his scar, painted in gold. Keeping his gaze locked on to hers, he hooked her left leg over one broad shoulder and pressed his lips to the ankle peeking out from amidst the golden straps of her shoe. There was something desperate about the expression on his face, a desperation echoed in the feverish kisses that he then littered along her bare calf, his hand slipping under her right buttock to angle her center towards his wandering mouth.
By the time he'd gone past her knee, Rey was a shuddering mess of anticipation and desire, her silk panties completely soaked through. His first nip at her inner thigh caused her to cry out and, stars, if it wasn't the most exquisite form of torture, him taking his sweet time sucking bruises into her sensitive flesh, the pain and the pleasure forming a sharp, heady cocktail that made everything else melt away. She needed relief— needed it so badly that she felt like she was back in the desert, craving water to slake her parched throat. She closed her eyes and Jakku's sun burned in the darkness to the sound of string instruments emanating from the ballroom.
As the orchestra segued into the calenada, a dance that was as fluid as quicksilver and as light as air, Kylo's fingers latched onto the sides of Rey's panties, tugging so frantically that she was surprised he didn't rip them. She wiggled her hips to help, which probably looked more comical than erotic, but it got the job done.
Kylo was impatient, though— he'd only just managed to wrestle her panties out of one leg when he gave up and returned to the apex of her thighs. He afforded Rey no opportunity to be self-conscious, immediately sealing his lips over her and—
— and, Maker, it was gold, it was music, it was electricity, it was open sky—
She'd often wondered what this would be like ever since she'd first heard of such an act, but her imagination had fallen pathetically short of the real thing. His nose bumped into her clit as he licked away at her, long and deep, his lips pressing together at the end of every stroke so that it felt like yet another little kiss, each sensation sending out shockwaves that rippled through her entire frame until she was delirious with pleasure, whimpering and pulling at his hair and grinding against his sinful mouth. Sometimes it was too much and sometimes it wasn't enough but she didn't care, urging him on in a hushed, broken stream of there and yes and slower and more.
Her husband was blessedly quick on the uptake. When he worked out the rhythm that made her tick and set to it with a ruthless determination, she all but shouted, her spine arching, her head tipping back. And she saw herself in the antechamber's mirrored ceiling, her emerald skirts glittering in rivers of silk against the red velvet cushions of the chaise lounge, her lips parted and Kylo's dark head between her thighs, their two figures bathed in gold. Rey was suddenly glad he'd told her to keep the butterfly mask on; it added to the illusion of depraved glamor, she looked and felt like a goddess being worshiped, her hips writhing in time to the calenada as the orchestra played on in the next room.
Kylo pulled off of her with an obscenely loud smack, two of his fingers picking up the slack as they thrust into her dripping heat while he stared up at her with blazing, hungry eyes. "You're so wet, Rey," he gasped out, his fingers curling inside her. "Tell me you'll only ever get this wet for me—" There was a raggedness to his deep, mellow voice, a plaintive edge that nearly broke her heart. "Tell me I'll always be the only one, cyar'ika—"
The tender, unexpected endearment chipped away at the last of Rey's defenses, as did the increasingly urgent pace of his fingers bringing her closer and closer to release. "Yes," she choked out, and there was a certain relief when she said it because, no matter what the future held, this was the truth, here and now. "Yes, Ben, only you, always—"
Those words were all he needed to hear. He bent his head over her again, his tongue lapping at her slickness as he continued pumping his fingers, and it was almost too much to bear. Her body was caught between twisting away from him and chasing the bliss, and it finally decided on the latter when he wrapped his plush lips around her clit and sucked. Both her legs latched around Kylo to dig the points of her stiletto heels into his back and he groaned and redoubled his efforts. The calenada soared to its crescendo and so did Rey, her scream drowned out by the crashing symphony, her vision flashing white as she tipped over the edge and into what was quite possibly the fiercest, most glorious orgasm of her life.
Still on his knees, Kylo reached up to hold her through the aftershocks, his face buried in her neck. "Mine," he mumbled against her skin, sounding helpless for some reason, sounding like this was more her victory than his.
In her dazed state, Rey barely managed to card her fingers through his hair. "Yours," she whispered, and it felt damning and wonderful all at once. It felt like another point of no return.