Each cheek pressing separately against the tight fabric with a gravity-defying fullness, the ass crack visible as a deep shadow line down the center of the stretched material, the whole of it moving with the small shift of her weight from foot to foot.
Her boobs, visible in profile as she turned slightly, were the kind of boobs that made structural engineers anxious — massive, round, straining against the front of the dress with the specific pressure of flesh that had significantly outgrown its container, the dark nipple outline visible through the fabric, the swell of them enormous and heavy and very obviously uncontained.
The plate in her hand hit the floor.
The sound of it — ceramic on wooden floor, a bright sharp crash — cracked through the apartment like a gunshot.
She spun.
Her boobs swung with the motion, the enormous weight of them rocking sideways with the sudden turn, the dress struggling to contain the momentum, the fabric stretching further as the jiggle settled.
Her face was — red. Completely, immediately, all the way to the tips of her horns red, the blush of someone who has turned around to find a naked man holding a naked pregnant woman in a doorway where there was previously just a wall.
"WHAT ARE YOU—" Her voice came out at a volume inconsistent with the room size. Her hands flew to cover her eyes. All ten fingers pressing against her face, her enormous boobs bouncing once more from the gesture. "What — you — there’s a — I don’t—"
He chuckled.
"My bad."
She made a sound through her hands. A strangled, mortified sound.
"My bad?!"
"My wife told me to bring her to the room." He shifted Soha’s weight in his arms, completely unbothered. "All her clothes became wet. We needed to dry off."
The woman behind her hands made several sounds in quick succession — none of them words. The sounds of a person whose mind is processing several simultaneous images they did not consent to receive and is struggling to prioritize them in any useful order.
Soha — being held naked in his arms, her pregnant belly visible, her freshly cleaned skin catching the warm lamplight — turned her face into his shoulder and made a sound that might have been either dying or laughing.
"I — you are not — I don’t—" The blonde woman lowered her hands just enough to look. Saw everything again. Raised her hands again. "One moment."
She turned.
Moved to the closet with her back firmly to them, her enormous ass moving under the stretched fabric with each step — the specific, gravity-defiant sway of a woman built like that, each step sending the full weight of each cheek through its own independent arc, the dress riding up slightly at the back with the motion.
She pulled a blanket from the shelf without turning around.
Threw it.
It unfolded in the air and landed over both of them in a heavy woolen fall, covering Soha’s bare body and the length of his arm and the first several inches of what the blanket had clearly been designed not to acknowledge.
He caught it.
Laughing now — a real laugh, short and warm, the laugh of a man who finds the situation genuinely funny rather than performing the finding of it funny. He shifted Soha in his arms, pulled the blanket around her with one hand, and crossed the room to the couch.
He sat.
Soha ended up in his lap.
Which she had clearly not agreed to but was also wrapped in a blanket in a stranger’s apartment in what appeared to be an actual building somewhere cold, and was perhaps choosing her immediate battles.
The blonde woman — horns catching the lamplight, still red to the ears — moved to the kitchen with the rigid posture of a woman who has decided that coffee is the correct response to this situation and is going to execute it without looking at anyone.
Her ass moved with each step.
The crack of it visible through the stretched dress. The individual weight of each cheek doing its independent work. The dress reaching approximately to mid-thigh and the lower curve of each enormous cheek just barely contained by the hem.
He looked at it.
He looked at it with the specific, unperformed attention of a man who has not chosen to look but whose eyes have made a unilateral decision.
Soha felt his attention shift.
She looked at his face.
She looked at the direction of his eyes.
She looked back at his face.
Her elbow found his ribs.
Not gently.
"Hh—" He turned. "What?"
"All men," she said, her voice coming out dry and flat and carrying approximately twelve years of accumulated evidence for the position, "are the same."
He rubbed his ribs.
Looked at her.
"Then why not," he said, "let me come inside you."
She blinked.
"I might become addicted," he continued, his eyes dropping to her belly where it pressed against the blanket between them, "to your body."
The silence lasted three seconds.
Her face did several things in sequence.
Then her jaw closed.
Her eyes dropped.
She turned her face — slowly, with the specific deliberateness of a woman making a decision she’s going to be annoyed about — and pressed her cheek against his shoulder.
He blinked.
She was — resting on him. Her face against his shoulder, her body leaning into the side of his chest, the pregnant belly pressing warm against his ribs through the blanket, her breathing slow and deliberate and directed at his collarbone.
He looked at the top of her head.
Her damp dark hair. The crown of her head against his jaw.
He had not been expecting that.
He had been expecting, in approximate order of likelihood: another threat, an energy conversion attempt, a bite, or a glare of sufficient intensity to strip paint.
Not this.
"Who are you," she said.
Her voice came from against his shoulder, slightly muffled, stripped of every register except the simple and direct. Not the cold warehouse voice. Not the cracked shower voice. Just — a question. The question. The one she’d been rebuilding toward for the entire last several hours, arriving now in the most structurally naked form it had.
"What is your name, to begin with."
The blonde woman arrived with the coffee.
Two cups. She set them on the low table in front of the couch without looking directly at either of them, her face still carrying the residual blush, her enormous boobs pressing forward as she leaned to place the cups — the dress front straining, the dark outlines of her nipples swaying with the lean, the whole arrangement of her chest moving with the involved physics of something that large resting in something that small.
She straightened.
Smoothed her dress.
"I don’t know why I helped," she said, to approximately the middle distance between them. "I just — did what seemed necessary."
She turned back to the kitchen.
Her ass did what her ass did.
He watched it.
He was aware of Soha’s hand moving against his ribs in the specific, measured way of a woman deciding whether this one was worth the elbow.
He looked down at the top of her head.
"Cruxius," he said.
A pause.
"Cruxius Blac."