Tangled
She had silk on her stomach. Her own, from her fingers. Thin strands of webbing stuck to the skin below her ribs and across her hip, dried and translucent, catching the light from the streetlamp outside. The mess from him she'd wiped off with his t-shirt, which he was going to have to deal with later, and she'd done it without asking which was either comfortable or rude and he couldn't decide which.
He picked at a strand with his fingernail. It peeled off in a thin line, stretching before it snapped.
"Ow," she said.
"Sorry."
"It pulls."
He was more careful with the next one. Pressing his thumb against her skin to hold it and peeling the strand sideways. It came off cleaner. She watched him do it, lying on her back with her arm behind her head, and neither of them said anything for a while. His back was warm where the cuts had closed.
There was silk in her hair too. A web of it at the back of her head where it had been pressed into the pillow. He reached for it and she turned her head and he worked the thread out, gentle, unwinding it from the black strands. She closed her eyes while he did it.
"Peter."
"Yeah."
"Is this just the spider?"
His fingers stopped in her hair. She wasn't looking at him. Her eyes were on the ceiling. The crack. She probably couldn't see it in the dark but she was looking in that direction.
"This. Us. The- all of it." Her jaw was tight. "The bond makes me want to climb through your window at midnight. I know that. But is that all this is."
He thought about it. He owed her an honest answer and the honest answer was complicated and he didn't have a speech ready because he never had a speech ready.
"It's both," he said. "The bond is part of it. I'd be lying if I said it wasn't. But I noticed you before the bond. At the exhibition. Before the spider bit either of us."
She turned her head. Her eyes were on his.
"You remember that?"
"I was standing in front of a gamma radiation display and you were arguing with your friend about cesium half-lives. Thirty point one seven years, not thirty. The point one seven matters."
Her mouth opened.
"I pay attention," he said. "I noticed your laugh first. You won the argument and you laughed and I stopped walking. The spider hadn't bitten me yet. The bond didn't exist. You were just a girl with a good laugh arguing about isotopes and I stopped walking."
She didn't say anything. Her eyes were wet. She blinked and they weren't.
She kissed him. Slow. Her hand on the side of his face, thumb against his jaw, and her mouth was soft and careful.
She pushed him onto his back.
He went. Her hands were on his chest and she swung her leg over and she was on top, her knees on either side of his hips, and she was sitting up and looking down at him and her hair was around her face and the streetlight through the window lit one side of her and the other side was dark.
"Stay there," she said.
Something stuck to his left wrist. Thin, warm, tacky. He looked. Silk. A strand of webbing from her index finger, wrapped once around his wrist and stuck to the headboard. She did the other one. Right wrist. Same motion, deliberate, the thread firing from her fingertip and wrapping and sticking. Both wrists webbed to the headboard.
He pulled. The silk held. Tight enough that he couldn't move his hands.
"Stay," she said again.
He looked at her. She was on top of him and she'd just pinned his wrists with webbing she'd been accidentally leaking an hour ago and now she was using it on purpose. Her eyes were steady on his. Hungry.
She reached between them. Took him in her hand. He was hard again and her grip was warm and firm and she stroked him once, twice, watching his face while she did it.
"Your face," she said. "You look like that."
"Like what."
"Like that. When I do this." She stroked again. Slow. His hips pushed up and she let them. "Right there. That."
He pulled against the webbing. His wrists didn't budge.
She rose up on her knees. Guided him to her entrance. Sank down.
Different from below. The angle changed everything, gravity doing the work instead of his hips. She took him in slow, inch by inch, her weight settling, and he watched her face the whole way. Her eyes half-closed. Her mouth open. A small sound on each inch.
She bottomed out. Her hands flat on his chest. Her weight on him.
"'Mm.'"
She rolled her hips. Slow. A grind forward and back, not lifting, just rolling. The friction was everywhere and his hands were pinned and he couldn't grab her hips, couldn't pull her, couldn't do anything except lie there and take it.
"The spot," he said. "Behind your ear. When I'm inside you and I touch it you shake."
"Don't tell me what my body-"
"You're shaking right now."
She was. Her thighs were trembling against his hips. She ground harder, trying to control it, and the trembling got worse. Her fingers curled against his chest.
"Shut up."
"I'm just saying-"
She leaned forward and kissed him to stop him talking and the angle changed when she leaned and her breath caught against his mouth. She started lifting. Up and down now, slow, the wet sound of each drop audible in the quiet room. She was watching his face and he was watching hers and the silk on his wrists creaked when he pulled.
She set the pace. Each drop deliberate, controlled, her weight taking him deep and the withdrawal slow enough that he felt every inch leave and come back. Her breathing was heavy but she was holding it together better than before. She was looking at him.
"Keep your eyes open," she said.
He kept them open.
She moved faster. The control started slipping. Her drops got shorter, less deliberate, her hips grinding at the bottom of each one. The webbing on his wrists was pulling taut and the silk creaked. Her nipples dragged against his chest when she leaned. Her breathing went ragged.
"'Ah- geo-gi- right there- ah-'"
Korean and English tangled together. She pressed her mouth against his ear. Close. Her lips on the shell of it, her breath hot, and she whispered something he didn't understand.
"Nae geoya."
Two words. Quiet. Her hips moving, her voice in his ear, her fingers on his chest.
He didn't know what it meant.
She came. Her hips slammed down and ground and her back arched and she went silent, her mouth open and no sound. Her pussy clenched around him in pulses, tight enough that his vision blurred, and her fingers gripped his chest and the silk fired from her fingertips in a burst, threads spraying across his skin and the sheets and the headboard. Her thighs locked. She shook.
He came with her. Buried inside her, no pulling out this time, the heat and the tightness and the pulses dragging him over. The silk on his wrists snapped. His hands went to her hips and held her down and he came inside her and she collapsed forward onto his chest, breathing hard, her forehead on his collarbone.
The room was very quiet.
"You broke the webs," she said. Into his collarbone.
"They broke themselves."
"Those were good webs."
"They were great webs."
Her laugh was muffled against his skin. Her body was still twitching. Aftershocks, small clenches around him, spaced out, getting weaker.
He got water.
The bathroom was down the hall. He went in his shorts, careful on the creaky floorboard by the linen closet, and filled a glass from the sink. The house was dark. Ben's snoring was audible from behind the bedroom door. Steady.
Peter brought the glass back. Cindy drank half of it. He drank the other half. She held it with both hands like she was cold even though the room was warm.
He sat on the edge of the bed. She was on her side, her head on the pillow, the sheets tangled around her legs. One of the webbed strands connecting the sheet to the headboard had dissolved to a thin film. The rest were still holding.
"I'm glad you came," he said.
He heard it as it left his mouth. The accidental double meaning. Three jokes formed immediately. He opened his mouth.
"Don't," she said.
He closed his mouth.
"You were going to make a joke."
"I had three."
"I know. Don't." She was looking at him. Her eyes were serious and tired and she wasn't giving him an out. "Say it again. Without the joke."
"I'm glad you came. Tonight. Through the window."
"Mm," she said. Quiet. "Me too."
He sat there. She reached for his hand and held it and the bond was a low warm hum between their palms.
She picked up the pillow. The one her head had been on. Looked at it.
The pillowcase had dissolved. Her webbing had been pressed into the pillow earlier, and the acid in the silk or the heat or whatever broke it down had eaten through the cotton. The pillow was bare. White foam with a yellow stain on one corner.
"Your pillow," she said.
He looked at it. He looked at her holding the destroyed pillowcase with a bare pillow underneath.
"That was my good pillow."
"You have a good pillow and a bad pillow?"
"Everyone has a good pillow and a bad pillow."
She laughed. Hard. Her hand came up to cover her mouth and the laugh shook her whole body and silk fired from her fingertips, a burst of threads that shot straight up and stuck to the ceiling.
They both looked at the ceiling. Fresh webbing, a small patch of white, directly above the bed.
"That's going to be there in the morning," Peter said.
"It'll dissolve."
"Not before May comes in to say breakfast."
Cindy laughed harder. She tried to stop. More silk. That made it worse.
He lay down next to her. She was still laughing, quieter now, subsiding, her body curled toward his. Her leg over his. Her head on his shoulder. The bare pillow between them.
Her breathing slowed. The laughing stopped. Her hand was on his stomach, palm flat, and a dissolving thread of silk was stuck between her fingers and his skin. It was warm. Barely there. It dissolved as he watched, the strand thinning to nothing and leaving a faint sticky residue on his skin.
Her fingers twitched. A small movement, involuntary, the fingers curling and relaxing. She was falling asleep.
"Five more minutes," she said.
Her voice was already half-gone. Thick. Her breath warm on his shoulder.
He looked at the ceiling. The webbing. The silk was already thinning at the edges.
He didn't wake her up in five minutes.