Chapter Text
‘I’ll just quickly clean up before I go,’ Ingrid says, with practiced detachment, rolling her shoulders as she sits up slowly on the bed.
Diana still has her back to her, standing stark naked in front of the window, framed by light like the unholy masterpiece she is. ‘You know where the spare toothbrushes are,’ she says without turning. Without emotion of any kind.
At some point, shards of pleasure and release threatening to tear her apart, she lost count of how many times she fully unraveled against Ingrid's mouth. Now, the delicious ache of her leg muscles suggests at least four. The resounding throb of overstimulation between her legs says it could easily have been more.
She doesn't turn even as she hears the other woman pad across the room towards her. Wrong way to the bathroom, she wants to jibe, but words - any words - stick in her throat. Ingrid doesn't speak either, which is never a good sign; they should be several cutting barbs and witty ripostes in by now. She can usually rely on the other woman to kick that off, on the rare occasions she herself can't.
This isn't the first time Diana has let her guard too far down, but the stupidity of it today - all her own - gnaws away at her; anger tempered with self-disgust so visceral it makes her hands shake. Ingrid is likely the only person who knows that her loathing of incompetence in others is only outdone by her loathing of perceived incompetence in herself. Or, even worse, of weakness.
They have done this countless times before - Ingrid pliant and giving underneath her, Diana’s knees framing her face, hands against the wall or gripping the bedframe to keep her steady as the other woman licks and kisses, sucks and nips and teases inside her, fucking her into oblivion. Usually, it makes her feel potently alive - full of fire, a heady mix of need and power coursing through her veins, pounding in her ears and chest and cunt. Sometimes being on top of Ingrid is indistinguishable from being on top of the world.
She knows she should be able to deal with it, however overwhelmingly hot the sight and sound and feel of the other woman against her becomes. But she still feels dangerously off-kilter. She shakes her head slightly against whatever it is that just happened.
Ingrid had behaved perfectly, gloriously submissive and obscenely masterful, as always, in everything she sets her damn mind to - including those moments when she actively does try and upend the agreed rules of engagement in this exquisite war of attrition between them. The first time Ingrid had ever flipped them over on the floor and had her suddenly on her back, Diana had been breathless at the speed and strength of it. She knew Ingrid was fit - had spent more time than she cared to admit cataloguing the subtle ripples of muscles in her arms and thighs and back - but she’d never realised she herself was someone who’d enjoy being thrown around. The second time it happened, she was less shocked but no less frantic. And when the other woman leaned in, a little of her weight behind the forearm across Diana's throat, she came in seconds.
Ingrid, of course, gloats openly at these rare moments when Diana definitively loses, regardless of the game. On the few occasions she has fucked up or hesitated - on the even fewer she has come completely undone and relinquished everything with Ingrid firmly in control - it is every bit as mortifying as when they are at work. As though the other woman spends at least half of the time lying in wait for the most opportune moment to pounce, claws out and teeth bared. Diana is not the one who gets off on being humiliated, but Ingrid always knows exactly how to get away with it - how far to push; how very infrequently and carefully to truly subvert their dynamic.
But there was nothing so calculating in it today.
Diana can't help the instinctive need for a debrief, even if only with herself. Even if charting exactly what has happened makes her legs start to tremble all over again. Analysis always helps avoid future mistakes, some pointless internalised training manual unhelpfully provides.
She had been almost drowning in pleasure, still glowing from her last orgasm even whilst being pulled towards another. Everything inside her felt like it had been shaken loose and was flowing together, liquid and bright as molten metal. She surrendered willingly to the waves that were about to pull her under, breathless.
Glancing down had been Diana's first mistake. There is no better view, to her mind - the wanton way the other woman always gasps and writhes and arches against her as though she were fucking Ingrid and not the other way round.
But this time, the word she heard made her hips and breath both stutter. It was her name in Ingrid's mouth, sighed out against her own slick heat, even as she continued to devour her alive. The one word she has never dared - never been close to permitted - to shape her lips around in this context. The three sharp syllables of it slid through Diana's body as easily as a sharpened knife through silk. No warning would have been enough. Her head swam and her heart - she didn't even want to think about what her heart had done. It was a miracle her body didn't crumple completely, especially as she came again, hard, and the other woman didn't stop or slow down or pull back for even a second. Instead, Ingrid's hands were everywhere - somehow both holding her in place and pulling her closer, arms wrapping around Diana's legs until she felt safe and held and terrified and ready to shatter into a thousand, thousand pieces.
After that, there was nothing in the world except her hands tangling in soft, silky hair, that filthy, talented mouth on her, and the caress of the achingly familiar voice still saying her name again and again like a spell. Like a fucking curse with the power to unmake this small world they never acknowledge having built together.
Diana couldn't make sense of what she was feeling then, delirium curling around her like smoke. But even through the haze of it, the image of the other woman’s tongue writing six simple symbols against her burned itself into her imagination: I-N-G-R-I-D. Achingly slow, letter by agonizing letter. The intimacy and implied possession of it - the claiming it seemed to symbolise would normally have made her bristle. Instead, it pushed her right over the edge again.
‘Fuck,’ Diana had said, at some point that might have been a hundred years later, and the word came out as something ragged; something so raw that even the memory of it now makes her squirm. Her voice has never sounded like that before. She didn't even understand what the word meant; what any word meant. Her whole being - body, mind and soul - was no longer her own. She felt stripped back to her most animal essence and somehow famished; made of nothing but instinct and sweat and need.
And still Ingrid didn't stop. She was like a woman possessed, only pausing for the shortest of reprieves to say breathlessly, ‘Another.’ The throaty vibration of the word etched itself into her skin. It wasn't quite a plea, but it certainly wasn't a request either. Their eyes met and Diana had to look away almost immediately, although not before she let out an unintended whine at the sight of her own dewy arousal coating the other woman's chin; the casual way she licked it off her lips like something precious, not to be wasted. Of course only Ingrid could ever look so deeply, intolerably self-satisfied in such a condition whilst she herself was losing her mind. Diana didn't have the strength - or the inclination - to say she couldn't manage any more. Fortunate - she was already perilously close to sobbing, or worse, babbling out something she could never take back.
But there was a change in Ingrid too, her earlier ferocity turned to languid, almost lazy nudges and strokes. It was almost impossibly slow this time, the build-up gradual and endless and tender. Diana's body seemed to ebb and flow like tides, utterly powerless against the other woman's will, her mind hot, white static. There was only sensation, only this journey, only the sounds coming out of her own mouth; sounds that she had no conscious control over. And still Ingrid didn't relent, fucking her right through the eventual orgasm and out the other side.
This wasn't close to the first time one of them had pushed the other beyond what was strictly sane. Not usually this way round, though, and never with such an obvious lack of planning and intention. Diana can't bear to think what else she may have said or asked for or confessed after the moment when everything tipped over into a slick, hot blur of ecstasy and overwhelm and torture.
Ingrid always has been innovative in her interrogation techniques, she thinks, and in getting exactly what she wants. The bitter taste of the thought is familiar, and it brings her back to herself a little; helps her eyes focus on the drops of condensation making their way lazily down the window pane in front of her.
She feels a hot, steady breath against the back of her neck. There is an excruciating moment where she has no idea what Ingrid is going to do, and can only hope that she’ll be more able to catapult them back into their well-practiced default mode of snide, ruthless put-downs as barely disguised flirting. But the world has definitely tilted just a little too far on its axis, and refused to shift back. Diana has known it since she came back to herself, panting on the bed, hiding face-down under her own arms, alarmed and enraged at the hot threat of tears and emotion rising in her chest.
Diana knows she’s missing a genuine visual delight; knows that if she could bring herself to turn around, she could revel again in the glistening, wet reminder of what they have just done all over the other woman's irresistible face; to drink in those remaining moments when Ingrid's eyes are still glossy and a little unfocused. These are images she relishes - the ones she files away with care and attention so that she can revisit them as often as she wants: in interminable meetings full of smug men and incompetence; in the bull pen or office when Ingrid interrupts her or shoots her down without a second thought. And, because she is weak and occasionally self-destructive, in her bed, alone, on miserably cold London nights.
There is a second of silence that feels like a lifetime, Ingrid's warmth tangible behind her and her own eyes fixed on the faintest of reflections in the glass. Please don't break this, Diana thinks, scared of any words that could leak out of the other woman’s mouth into the air.
When the sharp sting of a single fingernail digs into the top of her neck and wends its way down her back, the scratch and pace of it exquisite. The noise that comes out of Diana is so honest - so completely without intention or forethought or game - that she can't even parse it herself. Neither, it seems, can Ingrid, although she only pauses for the very briefest of moments before continuing its rough, slow journey down her spine. Diana hopes it leaves a mark, as red as a fresh, bloody gash. The second the touch is gone and she hears the other woman walk towards the bathroom door, she almost wants to call her back again. To just have her near, even silent and awkward and uncertain because, really, her own stupid heart is the worst fucking traitor of them all.
She feels entirely unhinged; something unidentifiable but long-known now uncurling inside of her until it occupies the space she needs for breathing and thinking and living. In the cold, unforgiving light of the outside world, Diana is under no illusions. She knows - as surely as she knows anything - that they are absolutely, irreparably fucked.