The dream fades and I realize I´m awake. I push myself up on my elbow and watch her sleep. Blond hair tousled and spread over her pillow, eyes closed in sleep, slight smile on warm lips, sheet kicked down to her waist because she likes it cooler than I do. Moonlight silvers pale skin and limns curves, casts muscles into shadow like a marble statue. Statues don´t breathe, though, slow soft steady breaths of someone deeply and contentedly asleep, or smell like incense. She does, she smells of incense and tastes of some exotic spice from Wutai, rich and intoxicating, almost as intoxicating as the sounds of her pleasure.
I love drawing those sounds from her, the taste and feel of her body in my mouth or under my hands, or her hot warmth wrapped around me as I thrust into her, mind shut down in pure joy. Sometimes her sounds are almost enough to take me over the edge, the low shimmering cry when she comes, or the way she´ll cry my name sometimes when she wants me to take her.
I reach out to stroke one generous breast and stop myself before I wake her. She needs to sleep. Haven´t wanted someone this much since I was a teenager, and that thought kills desire, crushes it to dust under a weight of bitter guilt. She shouldn´t be here. Probably not in ugly, soulless Midgar. Certainly not in Shinra. And most of all, not in my bed.
No matter how much I want her there. Or she wants to be there, and I still don´t know if she does want to be in my bed. I don´t know if she thinks her job depends on it. It doesn´t. God knows I want her to stay, but she can leave. Whenever she wants. But she shouldn´t be here. She´s barely more than half my age, and my bodyguard or assistant or whatever title they gave her when they stuck her with me. Bodyguard to the Secretary of Urban Development. Probably voted most boring job in Shinra because nobody cares about me enough to remember I exist, much less attack me. But I´m not Heidegger and I never slept with any of my subordinates until now and I shouldn´t have started.
Because if this ever gets out she´ll be tarred with it and whoever they transfer her to after me will expect it. And I don´t want to do that to her. I don´t want to see that warm heart and bright spirit tarnished by the rest of the bastards I work with. Rufus may object to sleeping with subordinates and I agree with him, but he doesn´t run the company yet, and his father won´t care.
He won´t do anything to me other than humiliate me regularly, and there´s nothing new about that. Scarlet though ... Scarlet will make as much trouble and do as much damage as she can. I´ve turned her down more times than I can remember and devoted a disturbing amount of effort to staying out of her bed, enough that she´s started rumours I like men. If she finds out that I refused her in favor of a teenage soldier-girl, she´ll make my life a living hell. And what she´ll do to her ... I don´t like to think about it.
Elena ... I have to end this for your sake even more than mine. I can ... go to the Saucer or somewhere and build toys. Doesn´t sound too bad. But you don´t have anywhere to go. Would you even want to come with me? I don´t think you would.
I inhale her familiar scent as I lie back down and pull up the sheet. My resolve withers into dust as she snuggles up to me, mumbling something that sounds like my name.
Set around two years before the game begins, thus about four years before Stones.