18 – Mina, Morning
Her voice was climbing and his name was inside it, broken up across breaths that kept getting shorter, and the bed frame was hitting the wall in a rhythm he could feel through his knees and through his palms where they were pressed into the mattress on either side of her head and through his cock every time he bottomed out and she clenched and the sound of it, the wet sound of him pulling out and pushing back in, was louder than either of them.
"Ryo- Ryo- ah- ah- right there don't- don't change- don't you dare change any-"
He didn't change anything. He kept the angle and the depth and the pace and watched her face because her face was where it was all happening. Her jaw was open and her eyes were unfocused and her horns were pink to the tip and pressed into the pillow hard enough that the fabric was tearing where the points dug in. Her nails had been in his back for the last several minutes and the scratches stung when sweat hit them and he didn't care.
She got louder. The words dropped out of her voice and what was left was pure sound, "ah- AH- AH-" each one punched out of her on each thrust and her back was arched so hard her shoulders were the only thing touching the bed and her thighs were shaking around his waist.
Then she broke.
The sound that came out of her was raw and wrecked and it filled the apartment. Ragged, torn, her lungs too empty to carry it properly, her mouth wide open and her whole body locking rigid. Her pussy clenched around him so hard his hips stopped moving because she was holding him there and her heels dug into his lower back and pulled him deeper and her hands clawed the sheets and the pillow and the headboard and anything she could reach.
She shook. Eyes rolled. The gold gone, just black sclera and the whites of her eyes and her chest heaving and the sound kept going, a sustained broken "ahh-" fading to a whimper, then silence, then just shaking.
He lasted about four seconds after that.
Three thrusts. Graceless. Buried to the hilt and his vision whited out at the edges and he came inside her with his forehead pressed against her collarbone and his hands fisted in the sheets and his jaw clenched so hard his teeth ached. The pulse behind his sternum hammered and the heat spread through his chest and his shoulders and his arms and the Quirk absorbed everything.
He didn't pull out right away. Stayed inside her while his breathing caught up with the rest of him. She was limp underneath. Boneless. Pink and flushed and covered in sweat, hers and his, and her eyes were closed and her mouth was curved up at the corners and one horn had actually punctured the pillowcase.
He pulled out slow. His cock slick, a string of cum between them that broke, and it leaked from her onto the sheet, white against pink. She didn't move. She was breathing like she'd run a sprint. Her thighs were still open and the mess between them was visible and obscene and she didn't try to cover it.
"That," she said to the ceiling, "was way better than manga makes it sound."
He dropped onto the mattress next to her. His arms felt like they belonged to someone who'd been doing push-ups for hours. "Manga?"
"Diagrams." She waved a hand vaguely. "And labels. With, like, arrows. Very informative. Very wrong about the noise part."
"You were reading sex manga?"
"EDUCATIONAL manga." She turned her head on the pillow. Her hair was wrecked. Matted on one side, sticking up on the other, a horn poking through the tangle. She was grinning. The grin had too many teeth and it was the best thing he'd seen all night. "Research. Important preparation. I was being responsible."
He laughed. It came out rough and tired and she laughed back and her laugh was loud and ridiculous and she was naked and sweating and laughing on his bed after the first time either of them had done this and the apartment smelled like sex and citrus and the fridge was still humming.
She rolled into him. Her body against his side, one leg thrown over his thigh, her arm across his chest. Pink furnace. Every inch of her skin was hot and the heat sank into him and he could feel her heartbeat through her ribs against his ribs.
"Ryo."
"Yeah."
"You're bigger than before."
His arm was around her shoulders. She was tracing a finger down his chest and over his stomach and the muscles there were different. He could feel it even without looking. The definition was sharper. The ridges more pronounced. His forearms were thicker. Subtle, but she'd had her hands on him all night and she knew what he'd felt like at the start.
"Training," he said.
"In the last hour?"
"I train hard."
She pinched his side. "Liar." But she was smiling and she put her head back on his chest and her horn pressed into his pectoral and it was uncomfortable and he didn't move.
He reached for the edge of the sheet to pull it over them. His hand closed on the fabric.
The sheet tore.
Clean through. His fingers had gone through the cotton and he was holding a strip about six inches wide and the rest of it was still on the bed and the rip was clean and straight and he hadn't felt any resistance at all.
He stared at the torn fabric. His hand looked the same. Fingers, knuckles, skin. The grip underneath was different. The strength that had been mid-pack yesterday, good enough to crack a pencil and draw with Bakugo, had jumped. The first-time bonus plus the new-partner bonus plus full sex, all stacked, and his body had absorbed everything she'd given him and it had hit hard.
Mina lifted her head. Looked at the torn sheet. Looked at his hand. Looked at him.
"Did you just-"
"Cheap sheets."
"Those are cotton."
"Cheap cotton."
She stared at him. He stared at the sheet. Neither of them said anything for a few seconds and then she put her head back down on his chest and he dropped the torn strip on the floor and the conversation ended because she was warm and he was tired and the argument about sheet quality wasn't one he could win.
He fell asleep with her on his chest and the engine humming behind his sternum and the rip in the sheet at the edge of his vision.
Morning came through the blinds in gold bars across the bed.
Ryo opened his eyes because there was movement. Mina was sitting up next to him, cross-legged, the sheet pooled around her waist. She was looking at him. Her hair was a disaster and the morning light caught her horns and her skin and the gold of her eyes were bright in the sunrise and she was just looking at him with an expression that was too soft and too open for her face and he didn't know what to do with it.
"Morning," she said.
"Morning."
"You talk in your sleep."
"I don't."
"You said 'doorknob' twice."
He hadn't. Probably. She was grinning. She swung one leg over him and settled her weight on his hips and he was already hard because it was morning and she was naked and straddling him and her hands were on his chest and her pussy pressed against the shaft of his cock through the sheet. She rocked forward once, testing, and his hands went to her hips on reflex.
She reached between them. Pulled the sheet away. Lifted up. Guided him to her entrance and sank down. Slow. Her eyes fluttered and her mouth fell open and her hands pressed flat on his chest and she took him all the way to the base and stopped.
"Okay," she breathed. "Okay. This is- wow. This angle is-"
She lifted up. Dropped back down. Her thighs flexed and her stomach tensed and she rose again and this time the drop was harder and she made a sound that was half moan half laugh.
"This is harder than it looks." She was grinning and flushed and her hips were trying to find the rhythm and she was overcompensating, going too far forward, too far back, her knees sliding on the mattress. "Like- how do people in movies just-"
"You look incredible."
She stopped moving. Her eyes held his. The grin changed. Went from embarrassed and funny to teeth and heat.
"Say that again."
"You look incredible."
She found the rhythm.
Her hips rolled and she rose and fell and her hands pressed into his chest for leverage and her breasts moved with each drop and the wet sound between them filled the room. She arched back. Her palms went to his thighs behind her for support and her stomach stretched long and the sunrise through the blinds caught her horns and her collarbones and the pink of her skin and for a second, with the gold light on her horns and her back arched and her mouth open, she looked like a figure out of a myth. Old and inhuman.
Then her knee slipped and she tipped sideways and caught herself on his ribs and laughed and Mina was back and that was better.
He grabbed her hips. Held her steady. Thrust up into her from below and she gasped and her laughter cut off and turned into "oh-" and he did it again and again and the rhythm was his now, driving up, and she was along for it and her voice was building.
"Ah- ah- ah- yes- yes- right-"
Faster. Her second orgasm hit hard and quick. Her voice went up and up and "HAH-" and then nothing because her lungs emptied and her mouth was open and no sound came out and her whole body locked and her pussy clamped down and she collapsed forward onto his chest with a shudder that went through both of them.
She lay on him. Breathing. Her face pressed into his neck and her horns against his jaw, warm from the flush. Her heart hammering through her ribs into his.
He came a minute later. Quieter than the first time. A long exhale and his hands on her hips and a slow pulse that went through him in waves while she lay on his chest and breathed.
The fridge hummed. Gerald watched. The sunrise got brighter.
They showered. The bathroom was small and the shower was smaller and they stood under the water together and her hip was against his and the steam made the acid-citrus smell stronger. She used his soap. She didn't ask.
She stole his shirt. A black t-shirt from the pile on the desk chair. It went to mid-thigh on her and she stood in his kitchen wearing it and nothing else and her pink legs came out the bottom and she looked better in his clothes than he did and he made rice and eggs because that was what he had and she sat on his bed and ate with her legs crossed and the shirt rode up and he saw the inside of her thigh where the acid-gland tissue was and he looked at the eggs instead.
"Ryo."
"Yeah."
"Are we dating?"
She was holding the bowl of rice in both hands. Her gold nails on the white ceramic. Her eyes on him, steady, and the grin was gone and the question was real.
"I think you should say it."
Her eyebrows went up. She put the bowl down. Straightened her back. The shirt shifted on her shoulders.
"We're dating."
"Yeah."
"FINALLY." She threw both hands up and rice went everywhere because the bowl was still in her lap and the motion knocked it sideways and rice grains scattered across the bed and his pillow and her bare legs and she scrambled to catch it and he watched rice fall onto the sheet he'd torn last night.
He was still laughing when she kissed him at the door. She was wearing his shirt and her yellow sundress was balled up in her bag and her acid-burned sneakers were on and she kissed him with both hands on his jaw and rice in her hair.
"My shirt now." She pulled back. Pointed at him. "My boyfriend now." She pointed at herself. Then back at him. "Clear?"
"Clear."
She turned and walked down the hallway and her pink legs disappeared around the corner and he heard her laugh, far away, muffled by the stairwell.
He closed the door.
The doorknob bent.
He looked down. His hand was around the brass knob and the metal had deformed under his grip. A clear indent where his fingers had been. Four dents, evenly spaced, pressed into brass like it was clay.
He let go. The knob stayed bent.
Ryo stood in his apartment. Rice on the bed, torn sheet on the floor. It still smelled like citrus and acid and sex. Gerald stared from the ceiling.
His body was different. He'd felt it during the shower and he felt it now. His legs were loaded with tension that hadn't been there yesterday. His reflexes were faster. When the bowl had tipped he'd almost caught it before the rice spilled and he'd been across the room. The jump from kissing had been marginal. The jump from last night was a wall.
Upper 1-A. Maybe higher. The pencil he'd cracked on Day 1 would be powder now. The ball Kaminari threw in PE would stop dead in his hand. The sparring draw with Bakugo wouldn't be a draw anymore.
If this is what one partner does. One night. What happens with more?
Recovery Girl had already flagged his healing rate. Aizawa had a notebook. If he kept gaining at this pace, the gap between his registered Quirk and his actual output would stop being explainable by training.
He looked at the bent doorknob. He'd have to replace it before the landlord noticed.
Mina's shirt was gone. His shirt. She'd taken it and she was on a train somewhere wearing it under her clothes and she was his girlfriend now and she didn't know what her body had given him and if she ever found out, every moment between them would be reframed as him using her.
The apartment was quiet except for the fridge. Gerald stared.
A week until the Sports Festival. A year and a half until Gunga. A brass doorknob with his fingerprints in the metal on a door that still smelled like her.
He went to find a screwdriver.
