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Rey thinks of him as she touches herself. In this stolen moment of privacy, in a dark corner of the crowded Resistance quarters, there are already so many things she’s working to forget: that her only concealment is a curtain drawn around her bunk, that they’re in the middle of a war, that the thing moving inside her is not a lover but the rounded grip end of a conveniently shaped hydrospanner. She might as well forget their enmity, too.
Hers is not the graceful self-pleasure of a holoporn starlet. Before she joined the Resistance, before she came to live in close quarters with so many men – before she started sharing brainspace with another man, a man whose thoughts and occasional viewing habits leak unpredictably into her mind through the parsec-spanning crack in reality that joins them – before all this, it never occurred to Rey that masturbation could be a spectator sport. She still hasn’t figured out whether the difference between the actors’ methods and her own is due to cinematic licence or to her own uncultured upbringing, like how she uses her eating utensils wrong or gets looks from the General sometimes for talking out of turn at meetings. The women in holoporn arch their backs and fondle their breasts and spread their labia open with scissored fingers. Rey bothers with none of that. She rubs her clit with vigorous strokes as her face scrunches up in a way that would probably look silly were anyone there to see her; somedays, like today, when her body aches inside for more, she reaches down awkwardly to fuck herself with whatever found object is smooth and phallic enough to get the job done.
That’s what she’s doing now. And she’s really enjoying it, thank you very much. The hydrospanner is thick and good inside her, and a sparkling pleasure builds in her clit as she rubs it to a steady rhythm, and her mind has drifted to broad shoulders and a strong sword arm and a pair of dark eyes that practically bleed vulnerability and want. It’s her he wants in her fantasies, not power, not vengeance, not anything else. As her orgasm builds, she thrusts harder with her makeshift phallus and imagines it’s his cock plunging in and out of her, imagines the sound of him pleading her name, imagines what it would feel like to let him in so completely and so willingly. What it would be like to join in body as well as in mind.
She comes silently, because it’s still a shared bunk room, but it takes a bare-toothed grimace to hold the cry back, and she’s hunched in on herself and still juddering with the aftershocks when a familiar voice, honey-dark and dangerous, says: ‘I’m not looking.’
Rey jumps and swears aloud. ‘You okay in there?’ calls another voice outside the curtain, one more reminder of how flimsy her privacy really is, as if she needs that right now.
‘I’m fine,’ she calls back. She needs to say something more; her brain is soup.
‘Was it a roach-rat? Did you see another roach-rat?’
‘Um … sure. Yeah. That was it.’
‘Those kriffing things,’ her unseen interlocutor grumbles. ‘I know money’s tight, but there has to be something we can do about these vermin crawling all over the base…’ He trails off, muttering about pest control.
Rey yanks the covers up to her chin, stuffs the sticky hydrospanner under her pillow, and whisper-snarls at her other, unfortunately not unseen interlocutor: ‘Where the hell do you get off, barging in on me like that?’
Kylo Ren turns to look at her. He raises his eyebrows, possibly at her unfortunate word choice or possibly – Rey’s stomach swoops – because she has left the hydrospanner handle sticking out at a visible angle. Turning to check would be letting him win. She holds his gaze fiercely, willing the heat from her cheeks to move into her eyes and burn him instead.
‘You know the bond doesn’t work that way,’ Kylo says, in a punchable voice that’s worlds away from his imagined croon in Rey’s fantasy. ‘I didn’t barge anywhere. These are my private quarters.’ Rey continues to glare, but instead of rising to the bait, Kylo’s haughty expression seems to soften; he gives her a rueful sort of smile and allows his gaze to drop first. ‘I was jerking off too,’ he admits. ‘It was bad timing. We were both’ – he clears his throat minutely, betraying, for the first time, a hint of embarrassment – ‘in the same mindset, and the Force took that as a cue to connect us.’
Rey’s eyes dart to his groin; she can’t help it. She can see now that his flies are out of order, fabric hastily pulled closed over the bulge but not properly fastened. She averts her gaze. ‘Well, it wasn’t a cue,’ she snaps.
‘I know,’ says Kylo.
‘Who are you talking to?’ calls Rat-Roach Guy through the curtain. Rey ignores him.
From the corner of her eye, she sees a rustle of black motion as Kylo finishes rearranging himself. Once he’s still, Rey deems it safe to look at him. She takes in his angular features and rumpled dark hair, the trace of a flush on his cheeks and the faint glaze of recent climax, and remembers: it is never safe to look at him. ‘Well,’ she says, to sever her train of thought. ‘This is awkward.’
Kylo shrugs like people walk in on him masturbating all the time. ‘Were you thinking about–’
‘Don’t you dare ask what I was thinking about.’
‘Not like that!’ He holds up a warding hand, very possibly the one that was wrapped around his own cock a few moments ago. ‘I’m not asking like that. I’m just trying to figure out … I mean, the Force bond, there must be some triggering principle…’ He falters under her glare. ‘I was thinking about you,’ he finishes in a sullen undertone.
He wants her. That’s not news; it has never been a secret. Rey has been inside his head. He wants her badly, but he doesn’t want her badly enough, and the reminder of that inadequacy – of the vast chasm between who he is and who Rey pretends he is in her fantasies – is a million times worse than her own failure to masturbate in proper holoporn form. Her shame catches fire; the heat of her anger consumes it, burns it to ash.
‘You could have come back with me,’ she says. ‘I’d have vouched for you.’
‘You could have taken my hand,’ he says. ‘I’d have given you everything.’
Deliberately, the flames inside reaching an ice-blue peak, Rey looks him up and down. ‘You,’ she says, ‘have nothing I want.’
It’s a lie. Kylo is the most skilled living Force user in the galaxy, and their mental link is reciprocal; he knows she’s lying. He has to. But where her own eyes blaze, his turn cold, and he curls his lip and says, ‘You should probably go wash that hydrospanner.’
It’s a petty betrayal, and it hits as hard as that catastrophic day in Snoke’s throne room. ‘You said you weren’t looking,’ Rey almost gasps, but that’s exactly what Kylo wants – to embarrass her, to regain the upper hand in whatever power game he has decided they’re playing – so she bites the words back with as much determination as she bit back her moans before, and wills her eyes to bore into his until he falters again, this time not in courtesy but under the flimsy pretext of a disgusted eyeroll.
He turns away from her. The bond breaks. Alone-ish once more on her bunk, the last thing Rey’s in the mood for now is sex, but she retrieves the hydrospanner anyway and fucks herself with it until her body yields one more grudging orgasm. Just to prove he didn’t get to her.
She refuses to allow herself to wonder if he’s doing the same.