Indelicate
Jayne was staring at the ceiling of his bunk, trying to decide whether masturbating would be worth the trouble. They'd been a week in transit, and he had gotten to the point of too bored to move. All his guns were clean, his muscles ached from working out, and anything else he could think of to do would have required spending time with eight people he was sick to death of looking at. He thanked the Lord they were landing on Persephone tomorrow, because he was getting to understanding why the black turned folks kuang qi.
He turned out the lights and closed his eyes, but he was too bored to sleep.
When he heard the hatch to his bunk open, he reckoned he was dreaming. People were good and wary of coming in unannounced, since the one time Mal had barged in and Jayne had, on reflex, pulled a gun on him. He did all the things he could think of to wake himself-- pinched his own arm, squeezed his eyes tight and opened them again-- but when he was done, River was still climbing down his ladder.
"Get outta here, little girl," he said.
She stood at the foot of the ladder, blinking at him. "I won't hurt you," she said. "Simon put solutions in me."
"Then you ain't got no excuse for barging into other people's bunks, now, do you?" he said.
"You have something I want," she said. "Nobody else would give it to me but you. You give it away so easily, you won't even remember."
"Ain't got nothing you could want," Jayne said. "You go on back to your room now."
She threw back the blankets. He'd stripped down to his undershorts before he'd turned in, and he felt more naked than that. Before he could find a way to cover himself back up, she knelt straddling him, ran a hand down from the middle of his chest to the waistband of his shorts. She stretched the elastic upward, looked inside, and grinned like someone'd handed her the biggest ice cream cone in the 'verse. "Don't be modest," she said. "You know what you have."
"That ain't for you," he said.
"But this is for you," River said. She let go of his shorts so they snapped hard against his belly. The sting didn't bother him half so much as how, when she took off her nightgown, she didn't have nothing else on underneath.
"No," he said. "That's for somebody else. Now, you go back-- you go back to your brother and you--"
"Tell him what you showed me?" she said. "Silly. You know who he'll believe. He said he'd sleep with both eyes closed, but who wouldn't watch you with both eyes open? He would. He does." Her voice got loud at the end, like she blamed Jayne for that, and not just because he was unreliable.
Jayne knew he didn't have no way of shoving her away from him that wouldn't look like he'd started this. He wished he was sly, wished he wasn't the kind to follow strange women into rooms that rented by the hour, wished he was anything but what he was. No one would believe he hadn't forced her. He'd even threatened her, the once, though it had been more to intimidate Simon than to put any fear in her. There wasn't nothing he could do but wait her out and pray this was some kind of game she wouldn't follow through on.
River sat cross-legged at the foot of his bed, so her pussy was opened up wide. "You want this," she said. "Want to have it all to yourself, have it first, before anyone else has touched it." She giggled like she was readying to torture a confession out of him. "You can't escape that. It's Freudian."
"You got me all wrong," he said. He hadn't never had a virgin, and the idea didn't hold a whole lot of interest for him. He liked his women broken in and well-practiced. Women who knew how to be fucked and enjoy it, who didn't have to be told how to go down on him, who could tell him just how to make them come. He got harder for a skillful whore than for a delicate flower who knew how to keep her legs shut. Or even one who didn't.
"Your mouth says no," she said, "but your body says yes." She leaned forward so her round little pink-tipped breasts hung down. He was lying so she couldn't yank his shorts off of him, but she got his dick over the waistband and rubbed the tip of it with her thumb. "Yes." Sure as she said, the sight and touch of a naked girl were getting him hard. There were some things a man could fight, but this wasn't in any way one of them. "Yes," she said one more time. She licked her lips and then the length of his dick.
She crawled backwards, like she was readying herself to pounce, and pressed two fingers into a spot on his foot. It must have been one of them acupuncture points, 'cause his hips bucked up without him telling them to. She whisked his shorts off of him before he could stop her.
She climbed on top of him and started grinding her little pussy against him, painting a line of wet on his half-hard dick. "Feels so good," she said. "Endorphins, rising hormone levels, autonomic reactions, so much that the brain can't make sense of them, so all it can tell us is that we feel good."
Jayne's brain was telling him no such thing. He felt like he'd been pistol-whipped and slammed against a fence too high for him to climb.
She locked his eyes in hers and licked her hand real slow, like he'd given her candy. She wrapped her wet hand around his dick and stroked it up and down, till he was jerking up into her fist. "There you are," she said, jutting her hips out so she could put the tip of his dick in her.
A thought occurred to Jayne, one even more discomfiting than the others. "River," he said. "River, stop it."
"Stop means go, to you," she said. Shouted, like with enough noise she could control him, or control her own damn craziness. "No means yes. The boys are girls, and the girls are on top." He wanted to cover his ears and keep her out of his head. She made his blood freeze.
He fought his way out from under her. He didn't care about hurting her no more. No matter what he did, she was gonna hurt herself on him, after a minute. "Ain't got no choice but to do what you say," he said, "but no way in hell I'm gonna knock you up in the process." He had condoms in a box under the bed, and he leaned over the side to slide the box out and get one.
She snatched the condom from his hand, tore the wrapper, and put it on him. "Don't need your babies," she said. "They'd come out painfully average. Graceful, though."
She crawled forward over him and guided his dick into her. He closed his eyes and tried to picture curves and imperfections. Women with dirt under their fingernails and lipstick that wouldn't rub out of his skin for days. But River didn't feel like they would. She was bouncing up and down on him, getting him deeper each time but not very far. And she was tight, almost like fucking someone in the ass. It made him feel like he was hurting her. It surprised him, how sick that made him. He hadn't realized how much he'd rather keep his sex and his violence separate.
He didn't know if she came. He didn't want to pay that kind of attention, and damned if he was going to do anything to help her. He didn't want to-- wanted to prove to her and to himself that he had that much self-control-- but the fact was, he didn't need nothing but some rubbing and the slick stuff inside the condom.
She stared at him like she was deciding whether to thank him or slap him across the face. She didn't do neither of those, though, but lay herself down on top of him so her breasts were squished on his chest. Like she wanted him to hold her.
He sat up quickly, throwing her backwards with his weight. "Nuh-uh," he said. "You got what you came for, and that's all you get."
"I can have whatever I want," she said. "We both know." She touched his lip with a long finger. "If I took anything else it would be gilding the lily. A gilded lily-- if I gave you one, you'd be a whore. And then you'd respect yourself in the morning."
She slid off the bed and stood in front of him. He woulda thought there'da been more blood. Some streaked the condom he'd already sealed up and tossed where he wouldn't have to look at it. But on River there was only a trickle down her thigh. She wiped it off with her hand and worked it in her fingers like it was soap.
She put her nightgown back on and climbed out of the bunk. The door echoed when she slammed it down. Jayne got up, climbed the ladder. He looked for red handprints on the rungs, but he couldn't find even a smudge. He pulled the locking latch so hard that it shoulda broke off in his hand.
He shoulda broke off in hers. Shoulda crumbled like plaster of Paris, fallen through her fingers.
He felt like she'd covered him in something sticky and grimy. Covered his whole body, matted his hair and ground it under his nails. But the water ran clear wherever he washed. He was standing with his hands under the tap, standing like a man, but he felt like he was cowering in the corner, shaking the way he'd seen her do. He wondered if that was what she'd set out to do to him-- make him frightened, like she was.
He dried his hands. The bedsheets stank of her. He tore them off the bed and hurled them at the ladder. He wanted to burn them, but Mal'd be right pissed off if he found a person lighting fires on board ship. And there would be questions besides.
Jayne didn't want no questions. No noise, no late-night visitors, no bedsheets, no blood. He closed his eyes and heard her laugh as she rutted him. "Stop," he said, like she was there, like she could hear him. "River, stop."