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Rey liked this kitchen, liked that she was the only one who really used it. Not like her own apartment where she was only entitled to one quarter of a refrigerator and someone was always using the stove. She chopped her vegetables methodically, took up the whole counter space to designate a separate little bowl for each of the kaleidoscope of colors so they could go into the stir fry in order of how quickly they'd cook.
There was a creak on the floorboards behind her, a looming presence she could feel without turning around. Then there were hands on her waist, pulling the spandex of her yoga pants over the curve of her ass, just low enough so he could notch the head of his dick at her entrance and push into her.
Rey inhaled sharply. It was always a lot, when he did this without preparing her first. He held her hips steady while he seated himself with another thrust.
"Keep chopping," he told her quietly, finding a rhythm that had her breath coming out in little gasps.
Rey raised the knife and managed to cut the onion into a passable medium dice.
In hindsight, dating Ben Solo had been a continued series of red flags.
No, not really in hindsight at all. The red flags had been obvious and glaring even in foresight, like they were flying from a train that she could see barreling toward her from nearly a mile off.
His very first message on the dating app had been brusque, straight to the point, controlling.
Meet me at Landmark Theatre tonight at 7.
Ridiculous. Laughable, even, and obviously she should simply unmatch and move on. But…
But maybe she was sick of the tedious blandness of that initial back-and-forth texting, all that effort to probably never meet up in person, maybe it had been awhile, maybe–
He got them tickets to some pretentious French film. She'd been impressed at first, thought he must be a man of culture, thought she should really prod him into monologuing a little about his interests, see if maybe she could learn a few things. But it became clear pretty quickly that he had no real intention of actually watching the film. As soon as the lights went down he had his mouth at her neck, his scruffy beard tickling her skin, his massive hand drifting into her lap to cup her none-too-gently between her legs.
Just sex then, Rey thought to herself, trying to muffle her whimpers into her palm while he crooked two ridiculously large fingers inside her. I don't know what I expected.
And it wasn't like she'd been so opposed to reciprocating but did he really have to hold her head flush to his lap while she swallowed him deep? Did he really have to make it so hard to keep her choked noises quiet, surely letting the couple on the other side of the theater know exactly what they were doing?
"Let's get dinner Friday," he told her when they emerged into a darkened street illuminated only by patches of orange sodium light.
She should say no, obviously, should probably be texting a friend to let them know she was in a sparsely populated area with a man she knew nothing about (that wasn't true, she knew what his semen tasted like), should be telling him in no uncertain terms that she would not be seeing him again–
They did the standard get-to-know-you questions over garlic knots at the Bertucci's, and maybe Rey should have been offended that she wasn't worth taking somewhere nicer, but hey, Bertucci's was pretty good, as far as mediocre Italian goes. She tried to explain, in as nonchalant a way as possible, that she didn't have any parents, knowing even as the words came out of her mouth that this made her the perfect target for someone trying to isolate her, the perfect prey if he was looking for a girl that would take awhile to be reported missing.
"I don't talk to my parents," he said matter-of-factly, and surely this was the biggest red flag yet–
He took her back to his one-bedroom apartment, a luxury in Rey's eyes. And she was prepared for sex that was maybe on the rougher side, but she hadn't expected him to pull her ass cheeks apart and lick her there–
She came with his thumb in her asshole, big red handprints on the backs of her thighs, the condom coiled mysteriously on the bedsheet next to her, slimy with lubricant but not with jizz.
"I'm clean," he told her like she'd believe him, and sure she was on birth control, but–
She got tested at the student health center, and then again a month or so later, because doesn't it take awhile for HIV to show up? Negative, negative, so he wasn't a liar then, at least not about this. She'd break it off soon, obviously, but what was the harm in a few more weeks, a little bit longer, while the sex was still good and nothing truly hair-raising had happened–?
The first time he peed on her it took her a good minute to even realize. They were in the shower– at his apartment obviously, her roommates didn't want him over, said he was too loud (Why do you let him call you his little cumbucket, Rey?)– and there was a sudden burst of warmth on the back of her thigh, hotter than the shower water. It wasn't until the yellow pooled around their feet that Rey turned on him, blinking water out of her eyes while she squawked in indignation.
"Ah, c'mon, it'll wash off."
He took care to shampoo her hair thoroughly, rubbing the suds down her body, made sure to get her calves and the soles of her feet too. And this should've probably been where she called it (he peed on her!) but she could already feel herself softening by the time she saw him again, her boundaries so stretched from repeated violations that they hung limp, the spring gone out. But there was plenty of time to break up with him later, and she would, obviously. Eventually. Certainly.
There were simply too many things that made him a bad candidate for a long-term partner for her to really entertain the idea of keeping him around. His entitlement to her body, for one. The unsettling way he took up space, in one moment slow and lumbering and in the next moving with almost a startling display of power. The way he just… decided things. The way Rey liked it.
And his lack of family. She'd be lying if she didn't admit that was the big one. Both of them orphans, him by choice. Rey had always harbored the hope that maybe she could find a big clan to marry into, so that her kids wouldn't have to be so alone.
So yeah, once she found a good opening she'd let him down gently, but she was in the final months of finishing up grad school now, it just wasn't the best time for a big upheaval. And she had to admit his apartment was starting to feel like a little sanctuary. Quiet, calm. He gave her a copy of his key so she could let herself in while he was still at work, and maybe it was just so she could get a head-start on dinner, when she decided to cook (probably a red flag that he never cooked for her, even if she didn't want him to), but she liked watching his face when he opened the door and saw her on his couch, his expression soft while he loosened his tie.
She would leave his TV on for background noise while she worked on her figures and appendices, her dissertation coming together in ragged fragments. He dropped beside her one evening after he got home, laying sideways to rest his head in her lap, careful not to upset the collapsible tray table which held her computer. He pushed up her shirt (she never wore a bra at his place) and sealed his mouth around her nipple.
Somehow Rey could still be surprised by the things he did. He popped off at her breathy inhale to tell her to, "Keep writing, sweetheart," before settling into a gentle suckle.
It was so unhurried, non-urgent, nearly not sexual. She did keep fussing with her references, reaching her arms around his head to type, the whole thing feeling almost utilitarian, like she should be proud of managing to balance her work with his demand at her breast.
Was this what it would be like to have a baby? She ran her fingers through his hair and could almost imagine it, nursing while she read, or wrote, both her body and her mind so… productive, both at the same time. But obviously this was a ridiculous fantasy to entertain, she was so far from having children it was laughable. She'd need to graduate, of course, and then break things off with him, take whatever requisite time she needed to grieve (grieve what, Rey? you don't even really like him) and find another partner and settle down and then–
She was so wet by the time he stood up again that she thought she might have actually left a stain on the couch cushion. He barely took one look at her pleading face before she was pressed against a wall, her shorts around her feet so she could feel the cold stickiness of her underwear against the sharp jut of her ankle, and then he was in her, hard and fast, grunting almost louder than her cries, and she liked that she could be loud here, liked that he never denied her this–
He took sex like it was his due, twice at night and once in the morning. Though lately it had been feeling almost like a due he paid her, servicing her body whenever she wanted, introducing her to things she inevitably liked. She told him once after a long day she was too tired, she just couldn't stay awake.
"That's okay," he told her solicitously. "You don't have to do any of the work."
She fell asleep with him inside her, moving slow like he could when he wanted to, and woke to an achy feeling in her core and a smattering of little bruises sucked into her neck. And when she went home, finally, to retrieve more clothes, she stripped nude and stood in front of her full length mirror, admiring the marks he'd made on her body, reached between her legs to find another glob of semen that had finally worked its way free.
It was less than a day before she found herself in his shower again, sighing as he sucked new bruises onto the junction of her shoulder, into the thin skin behind her ear. She didn't even startle when the scalding heat hit the back of her thighs. It was the same thing, really. It was all the same–
"You're my favorite place to piss," he told her seriously and she could only hum because when the fuck had that started to sound romantic?
The nightmare of her defense drew closer, and maybe Rey was never the most organized, but this was surely the most chaotic she'd ever been, waking and sleeping at odd hours, losing track of entire days. And maybe she'd set herself up for failure years ago when she'd decided that taking one little pill every day wasn't that hard, though she was sure the constant deluge of semen coating her insides probably hadn't helped…
You're just a little late, she told herself. It's probably just the stress.
But then she was late and nauseous, and goddammit this was the absolute worst possible time for this to happen. She stopped by the CVS on her way home and picked up a fistful of pregnancy tests, even though she was already pretty sure, nearly making it to the check-out before she about-faced and knocked a bottle of pre-natal vitamins into her basket, screamed at herself internally even as she bought them– you're not fucking keeping it.
This was it, the most obvious, clearest point to break things off. Maybe it would even be easy (just tell him you aborted his baby!) and still she hadn't done it, though of course there was the matter of actually aborting, which was proving trickier than she'd expected in a state without any particularly burdensome restrictions, in a town with three abortion clinics. Rose sent her a link to a site where she'd gotten abortion pills last year (Way faster and cheaper than going to a clinic, I'm telling you, Rey) and so now she only needed to wait two weeks for them to get here, and then probably a little bit longer, because that was when she was defending, and in the meantime why would she add the additional stress of moving all her stuff out of his apartment and giving up the one real source of comfort she had in her life?
"Do you want a poster for your graduation?" he asked her one night while she showed him her thesis, leather-bound and stamped in gold. When she frowned at him in confusion he clarified. "You know, for when you walk across the stage. People always have posters for their kids and stuff, I know it really sucks to be the only one who doesn't have someone out there…"
It occurred to her that his touchstone for graduation was probably an undergrad commencement, or maybe even a high school one (did his parents really not come to his high school graduation?) and so she explained how the thesis defense wasn't actually her graduating, that would come at the end of the semester, and in any case a hooding ceremony wasn't really the place for a poster. But it was very thoughtful of him to ask.
He sat in the back of the packed room while she clicked through her thesis presentation, showed off her nice vector graphics, patiently explained the last six years of her work. Everyone shuffled out for the closed questioning and she was a little distracted while she answered, wondering if he was okay waiting out in the hall. Her roommates weren't big fans, obviously, and it wasn't that unreasonable that they'd poison the well against him. But then again what did it matter, when it was only a matter of weeks– days– before it was all over–?
There were cheers when she emerged (Congratulations, Dr. Niima!) and there was a poster, or, really, tiled pieces of 8.5-by-11 paper spelling out her name and taped to the wall, and she hoped he didn't think she'd been lying, she just didn't think that was what he'd meant–
And then there he was, smiling at her, pulling her into a kiss that was way too much for in front of her advisor (another red flag, surely?) and she was a little flustered when he let her go, wiping her mouth and trying to compose herself while she talked to her friends, tamping down the unexpected emotion that suddenly welled up in her throat.
It's just fucking hormones, she told herself sternly. Did you forget you're pregnant?
He took her to an upscale Italian place to celebrate, much nicer than Bertucci's, though she really wouldn't have minded, and she declined the wine list (Just not really feeling it) and listened to him gripe about his boss, a man who sounded more ghoulish with every telling.
"I'm thinking of putting some feelers out, finding something new," he said, pausing. "You gonna stick around here, or…?"
That was the question, wasn't it? She had a Ph.D. and three months left of health insurance to her name, she'd need to find a real job ASAP, especially if–
No, no, that wasn't a real possibility, she needed to buck up and face reality, he was an ill-advised fling that got out of hand, she wasn't about to tie herself to this man for the rest of her life–
She hemmed and hawed a little in lieu of answering and maybe he could tell she was a bit out of sorts because he was very gentle with her when they got back to his place, smoothing his wide palms down her body in calming strokes, like it was enough just to be able to touch her. And it was Rey that fell forward onto her forearms and urged him inside, eager to lose herself in the raw ecstasy he provided, perhaps for nearly the last time.
She moaned when he slid home, hitting that spot it seemed only he could reach. They hardly ever engaged in oral anymore, it was hard to want that when they could have this– both of them panting in tandem, the slide of one body eliciting sparking pleasure in the other (she'd never find another dick like his) and Rey was never so aware of herself as when he was inside her–
"I'm pregnant."
It came out as a gasp, knocked from her mouth with a particularly hard thrust.
His rhythm faltered to a stop and without the quiet squeak of bed springs his breathing was heavy in her ear.
In the space between heartbeats Rey reflected that she had no real idea of what he would do with this information. Did he want kids? Or would he expect her to abort? And of course there was that statistic niggling in the back of her head, that a leading cause of maternal death was homicide, often committed by a romantic partner. But he'd never been violent with her, apart from all his little trespasses on her consent…
He pulled her up off her forearms to a kneeling position in front of him, holding her against his chest with meaty hands, and it was really a testament to his prowess over his own body, and hers, that he managed not to slip free.
"Are you going to keep it?" The question came out a bit breathless (though that was probably from the fucking) and Rey took a long moment to really consider. Of course she shouldn't, obviously the answer should be no, but there was a beat and then she felt her head start to nod, almost of its own accord, and then faster, more and more sure, absolutely certain. She could feel his big nose on the shell of her ear– was he nuzzling her?– and then the clear impression of his grin against the skin of her neck. When he spoke his voice was low, and soft. "Good."
He began to move in her again, slow, heavy strokes, his hands caressing her bare skin, cupping her breasts, palming the flat of her belly. When she came her pleasure was thick, and heady.
The edge of something very new. The gravity of something so familiar.
Rey graduated in garb reminiscent of a medieval monk, tried hard to keep a straight face while her advisor pulled her hood over the octagonal cap on her head. Oh, the blessings of academia.
And it was kind of awful, to not have any parents in the audience, but Ben was there (with flowers, not a poster) and he grinned ear-to-ear when she ran over to him after, caught her up in his arms and spun her around.
He handed his cell phone to one of her friends so they could take a picture of him and Rey together, and at the last second he dropped his hand to palm her belly through her ridiculous robe, even though they weren't telling anyone yet–
Red flag, Rey thought. And then, Too late.