Inch by Inch

A Short Story in the Lemon Tree Series

So, here we are guys. I'm starting this very nsfw series. But, lemme get one thing straight: These aren't necessarily PWPs. This first one, for one, definitely isn't.

Sexuality is a powerful, interesting thing. As a plot device, and psychologically. And there is the tidbit that it plays a huge role in our contentment and happiness, whether or not we live it in a way that fits us individually.

So, I'm gonna play around with sex in this series. Sometimes it's gonna end up being sexy, but not always. I'm gonna explore it in canon and outside of it, in fully new AUs and probably even within already established fanfic universes. We'll see!

One thing for sure, tough – you'll have to give me time with this series. This won't be a regular update, because writing smut is the most challenging thing out there. So, this will be updated whenever inspiration hits, and when I feel it's meaningful, and not on a schedule.

For this first one, I added an explanation in the end notes – where I'm coming from with this one. Because it's the answer to a long rant I ranted very rantily on tumblr ;)

Let's just say so much: This is about Mamoru's sexual awakening.

He had always been a little… uptight with things. Definitely inhibited. Ashamed. A prude, he'd overheard Minako betitle him once, with Usako protesting his cause, as he joined them at the Fruit Parlor after a late class, and found them talking sex, only to pretend he hadn't heard.

And he was, he supposed. Way more uptight than any boy his age that he knew, anyway. Not that he'd know firsthand, though, of course – it wasn't the kind of topic he would ever talk about... To anyone.

And so, he could see how Usako would grow frustrated at one point, even when she would never ever say so, yet... he was still a teenager, and however uncomfortable the topic made him, and however mortified he felt when showing even minimal affection in public… Inside (or when he just even closed his eyes, really) it was a different thing altogether.

He was definitely not lacking in desire.

He just didn't know how to let go. How to not freeze even at the thought.

Like that one time, when they'd fallen asleep in the middle of the day on top of his comforter. They'd been together for so long at this point that it was second nature. He couldn't quite remember which enemy had attacked that day, only that they'd been so exhausted that sleep had lured them both in, even when he had papers to write and she exams to prepare for…

And he'd woken up with his hand cradling one of her breasts, his fingers clutching the thin fabric of her blouse, slipping across her skin, warm and soft even through the barrier.

He'd been beyond mortified. His heart had started hammering, even when his blood had decided to relocate in frightening speed, and yet he couldn't will his hand away. Even more so, when he'd discovered she'd been long awake, heartbeat hammering beneath his fingertips, pressing her legs together and her bum against him... and he was a teenage boy, he couldn't deny it, and when she started grinding back against him, and her own hand had started wandering, he had to jump from the bed with a shuddered groan because he was hard and embarrassed and a fish out of water, and what the hell was he supposed to do in these situations?

She hadn't said anything. Or more specifically, she's said a lot, but hadn't commented on the things that had petrified him so. She'd apologized, even when he saw the flush of her skin and the way she kept her knees together too tightly. Had told him it was alright, she wasn't asking anything, he had all the time he needed.

It had been absolutely what he'd needed to hear, and at the same time wasn't at all.

He'd assured her that he wanted to… but he didn't know how.

She'd nodded, with a small smile. Had asked him if she was allowed to try.

He'd said yes, but please not right now, and she'd nodded and smiled and made him go out to the park with her instead. Somewhere public, somewhere where it was ok not to touch, and he was grateful and frustrated at the same time.

Because he wanted to touch her. He wanted to be enveloped by her. And he wanted so badly to know how to touch without feeling like this.

It was then that the dreams had started. Tormenting him night after night with tantalizing images of glorious golden hair spilling down her naked back and threading through his fingers, of his hands digging into her thighs and belly and breasts, of desire like a flood that shuddered through him as he pushed into from every angle possible, of words she whispered in his ears and that delicious, addictive feeling of losing himself in her that scared him so much.

He'd wake up with his erection already in his fist, and let go of it as if burned with a groan, only to hop into the shower and will it painfully away with the cold and shocking spray of water, because he didn't know what to do and he was so frightfully jealous of this person he was in his dreams.

This person, who could allow all these feelings in himself, who knew what to do, who wasn't him, even when he so desperately wanted to be him.

And how the next time – weeks later - that they had slept like this, and he lay spooned against her on top of his comforter like so many times before, yet it didn't feel natural anymore, he woke again with his hand where is wasn't supposed to be. And it was Usagi's hand that not only kept his in place, but lifted her shirt and slid his hand with a trembling touch into the fabric of her bra.

It felt as if his whole being were focused on the feel of the warm, soft, trembling flesh, and the beat of her hammering heart beneath his palm, and the sensation of her nipple hardening against his fingertips, and he had no time to jump and run, he came with a shudder, immediately, because it was too much and he wasn't used to it, and was mortified even when she gasped his name with that desperate hitch in her voice, when he finally jumped away too late.

She didn't comment, when he returned with a new set of PJs, and he breathed down her neck and held her in that way he usually did whenever he was so obviously frustrated with himself. She just took the hand that felt as if the feeling of her soft breast was scorched into it, and kissed his palm with the softest, gentlest touch of her lips, and he once again didn't know how he deserved her.

But afterwards – when those dreams in which he wasn't him, in which he could not only touch but kiss and lick and tease those rosy, soft peaks until she cried out for more, and he could give it – made him wake up rock hard and panting, and he fled into the shower like always, he didn't let the water take care of business.

It wasn't the first time he'd touched himself, obviously. It was also far from the first time he'd touched himself with her in his mind.

But it still held a lot of firsts, anyway. The first time he did it in uncomfortably bright light. The first time he didn't try to not do it. The first time he did it in a room where he could just glance across the small space and see himself do it in the reflection of his bathroom mirror, his fist pumping twitching, weeping flesh between his thighs as his breath came in labored puffs through stretched, tense lips. The first time he did it while she was in his apartment, sleeping in the next room.

And so he jerked off with her name on his lips and his mind where he swore not to go, but couldn't keep it from going anyway, and he came in a hot, white, exhilaratingly exquisite flash against the white tile, faster than he would ever admit - and it opened the door to repeat performances more often than not in the following months.

It definitely wasn't the lack of desire. In fact, the longer this went on, the more he felt consumed by it. As if a switch in his brain had been flicked and now his entire being felt this intense hunger for something he did not know how to go about at all.

It was difficult for him, to say the least. He'd barely mastered not flinching anytime someone other than Usako hugged him. It felt weird – too intimate. A sort of contact he had never known, didn't know how to react. What was proper, what was not. He'd grown up avoiding any sort of bodily contact – a shield meant to protect him from two things; reminders of the fact that he had not known this sort of affection in his life, and his very physically embodied powers that had always done things with his touch that he hadn't known how to control for most of his life.

It wasn't that he didn't enjoy a hug. It wasn't that he'd not always yearned for one. And it wasn't either, that the prospect of getting physical with the woman that had filled his thoughts for not one but two lifetimes wasn't anything but thrilling – but it reminded him painfully of the head start that anyone else had in the department of intimacy.

Not to mention that he was fully aware of the fact that all the things he had learned about sexuality - secondhand and through society – and all the things a man was supposed to like and do and enjoy in bed, seemed somehow not to be exactly … respectful. Or stress-free, either.

He'd come to just the touch of her breast like a thirteen year old. How the hell was he supposed to last a night at the first try?

And although he knew she would be nothing but patient with him, the longer this dragged out, the higher the expectation must be, right? How could they not be? And with that, he got more stressed. To the point that even when he was rock hard whenever he continued touching himself in the showers, he no longer came.

Usagi didn't pressure him. Not at all. Not in the slightest. But when he once again ran in on them talking sex – or, more specific, masturbation – and heard Minako advertising her favorite brand of vibrator even when Usagi didn't let anything slip of what happened in his bedroom – or not – he grew so frustrated with himself he could barely breathe.

Why couldn't he just…

It was that evening, when she sat in his lap and the kisses grew heated, that he swallowed all his feelings of inadequacy and forced himself to touch her there, rubbing tentatively across the fabric of her panties. Yet even as her eyes widened in surprise and desire, and her breath quickened and her nose scrunched up in that mesmerizing way like so… she ripped his hand away once her gaze flicked up to him and she saw the look in his eyes.

She cradled his face and whispered, even as she rained those soft, little Usagi kisses on his cheeks and forehead. That he didn't need to do this for her. She was ok. She wasn't asking anything. He had all the time in the world.

He shook his head, whispered back – he needed to learn how to touch. He wanted nothing more than to learn how to touch. He needed to give her this.

And when his hand snaked back down under her skirt and into her panties and spread the warm and soaking fluid across trembling, fluttering, slippery skin, as it coated his fingers more and more, it was the first time that he thought that maybe he could do this, as she came undone beneath his fingers, gasping wildly, hands clawing at his arm and into the fabric of his crisp and clean white button down shirt, and he watched her scrunch her face up in that incredibly sexy way that drove straight into him and made him rock against her, watched her shudder as she arched her back, watched the sweat pool in her collar bone just above the hem of her dress, even as her toes curled and he leaned over to catch the drop of moisture with his tongue.

Afterwards, when he held her as her breathing slowed, he felt like gloating. Proud in a way he had not known before, even when in the back of his mind that feeling of shame he was so well-acquainted with still lingered.

He shot it down, focused on the pride, the weird sense of victory in a battle he knew he waged only with himself, and the salty taste of her skin still on his lips, and asked if he could try something.

"Of course," she shot out, wide-eyed and expectant, before his trembling hands unbuckled his belt, wincing whenever his hands brushed against the very evident and very uncomfortably confined bulge in his pants.

But when he saw her eyes, so wide and expectant, glued to his hands, the way she bit her lip in anticipation… and it made him suddenly terrified of not pleasing her, of not… working.

The bulge disappeared with the jump in is heartbeat, and he swallowed thickly, unable to look her in the eye, when he pushed the flap of his belt back into the buckle and turned his back to her as he slumped with a heavy sigh on the foot of the bed, his hands finding his hair in frustration.

She picked up her mantra. It's ok. We're ok. You have all the time you need.

But he flinched away, ashamed, when her hand touched his shoulder from behind him. And her voice hitched when he did.

"Tell me what I can do," she whispered to his back, and he swallowed.

There was nothing she could do. This was his fault. He was the one who didn't know how to… who wasn't what… He shook his head.

"Is it me?" she asked in a small voice. "Do you not… I mean…"

He whirled around to her in shock. Appalled that she could even consider such a thing, and his heart broke when he saw how her arms had been slung around her knees, how she looked so small and unsure.

He crawled up the bed, sat next to her, but when he tried to talk he had to stop, and wrung his fingers in his lap.

He told her of the dreams, then. The tips of his ears growing hot and red he told her of what she did to him on a nightly basis. How sometimes, even when she was here, he'd sneak out into the shower and… what he did there.

He'd never stuttered so much in his life, never felt so much like burning, never felt so much like words were the wrong descriptors, and so many of them missing or…just too plain weird and uncomfortable to use.

And even when he saw the way she pressed her knees together, once more, and her breath became erratic while he talked, he forced himself to go on. To share.

How terrified he was. Wasn't a man supposed to be… cool and on top of this? Wasn't he supposed to work? Like a confident, hard beast that could bend her over and do to her… what he was supposed to do? Wasn't this how it was supposed to work?

She'd took his hands then. Wrapped her soft, gentle fingers around his larger ones in a way that felt like a cocoon, and smiled that sad, little, confident and gentle smile he'd seen her use so often, when her heart went out to stray cats and pained friends and crying strangers and suffering enemies. A smile that was uniquely Usagi.

She told him that she didn't want something like that. She only wanted him.

They didn't have sex. Not for a while, anyway. But, due to her gentle patience and that compassionate smile, somehow, he'd had the guts so that they'd come closer and closer in tiny steps in his own hungry pace that still felt right but that got bigger and broader and exhilarating to the point where he clung himself to definitions and denial… Because, really, it was sex when she moaned and writhed as you ate her dry, even if you never put your cock where it ached so hard to be, wasn't it? When you'd learned to make her come with just a flick of your teeth against her clit, of your precisely placed knuckles in her insides, through her clothes or with your lips coated in her essence. When the only barrier between the two of you was your own underwear, and when you'd learned to touch in many different ways that made her howl your name?

And how it was only in the beginning that he ground against the couch, as her thighs locked around his cheeks, pinning him in place, and he came into his pants, with an agonized whimper into her wet and dripping flesh, because it was all too much.

But it was that final barrier that took the longest to fall. That final step to truly and completely lay himself bare, both in the literal and metaphorical sense.

She'd stroked him through his pants at first, his erection jutting against her with every touch that made her giggle and the situation feel suddenly free, and later through his boxer briefs. She always asked first, and as much as the jut of fear whispered a no through his mind, the word was not in his vocabulary when her hands were against him, and he was thankful she kept within the line that he needed, but that he himself forgot in times like this where she would have only needed to ask and he would have been bare and inside of her within the moment.

But she knew him. And she knew when to ask and when not to. Knew when his mind was too absent to make decisions, and where his line was even when he forgot it, because he tended even to forget his own name at her touch. And so, the fabric barrier stayed even as he rocked his hips against her hand when she rubbed him through it in a way that made him lose his mind and will.

Or when it was no longer her hand that he rocked against, but her wet sex. And he could just make out her warmth through his fabric shield, and how her whimper turned needier with every upward flick, and the way he always choked around the frenzied torture that was feeling the way he slipped in just that little bit, fabric and all.

The way he pushed and pushed and she would buck back up, his tip twitching and causing him to scream when the fabric became coated in her wetness, but wouldn't give.

And how they both came with their cries swallowed in each other's mouths, humping against each other in starved rhythms, skin slipping against one another in the humid, August heat.

Until autumn brought dry air and their humping was not so dry anymore, and he finally slipped in for real – with a different barrier of the condom kind, and to the soundtrack of her relieved cry and trembling, fierce and guttural groans.

But it was a conversation in hushed tones one night that made that possible, and no touch.

When she'd asked him to talk through the fear and the shame one last time, and how she undressed in the dark silence, slowly, with her eyes never leaving his, but did not touch, to mirror the stripped feeling in his heart, when he had to speak of things he never learned to share.

And somehow she got him to talk, again, in a way that felt like vomiting all the scars on his heart.

How he, deep down, didn't feel like he deserved her. Didn't feel like he could ever do her justice.

And how it petrified him. How he had always been uptight, reserved, but this was so much worse. How, the moment he thought about sex, now, he was so sure he would not be enough. How it consumed his every thought.

And how every touch drove it home, made the fear lock down and spread until he could feel nothing else.

She'd swallowed and frowned at him in thought, sitting cross-legged in front of him in a way that suggested she'd completely forgotten how very naked she was, and that made his blush so much more intense while driving the point home how free she was with this and how tense he.

"But," she'd said, cocking her head to the side, baring her slender neck, "shouldn't you know best that touch is not for focusing on what's in yourself?"

He blinked at her. Didn't understand her at first, until he did.

His heart started hammering against his chest when he understood, and reached out to touch.

And how, for the first time since he'd started obsessing over this, he felt it again. The flutter of her emotions under his fingertips. Strong and tender and steady and for him.

How could he have forgotten that?

He sprang up on his legs, brought his other hand to her skin in a sudden, wondrous movement that made her giggle that light, airy whisper of vibrating air against his skin as he drove forward and stroked his cheek against hers, and felt the warm slip of her soft skin against his, felt the excitement and sunshine and longing that it whispered through his mind. All the tales her skin had to tell him.

He trembled when she took his hand and she pushed it lower, across the soft, pliant and utterly distracting curve of her belly, to the course curls beneath. Gasped when he felt the delirium she felt under his fingertips when he stroked across wet folds, the craving waves in her howling blood, once he allowed himself to connect.

It was so easy now to let his fear go. So easy now that he didn't forget that he could drown in her. That this was … more.

How could he have forgotten that?

And that intense love and acceptance that spoke through every stroke of her hand and every kiss she peppered on his neck and stomach and thigh.

How he felt it, suddenly. It was enough. He had all the time in the world. She was here, she was ok with this, she was content.

And how it hadn't been time at all, that he'd needed. But touch – without his fear whispering through his mind to taint it. How he suddenly did not need time when he had her.

And how he finally felt the electricity in between them, the need to feel more, make her feel more, not because he needed to reassure himself, not because he needed to prove something, not because he needed to succeed, but because he couldn't get enough.

The thrill of the intense need that fluttered like fog between them, coating them completely.

The rumble of his delirious moans when his barrier was no longer needed, the maddening need he suddenly felt for more. More.

How it could suddenly not come fast enough.

There had been no words, just looks and breathless nods and silent understanding when she'd bent over and snaked her hand into the pocket of her crumbled dress on the floor, producing the little foil packaging from it, and he needed to hiss the air through his teeth and scrunch his eyes shut when she rolled it on him, her fingers gliding, strong and sure and gripping, across twitching veins and pulsing skin.

How she'd bent backwards on the bed, hooded blue eyes never leaving his, and spread her legs.

The little nod, reassuring him, when his adam's apple bopped and his erection, too, and he felt her heat even through the condom, when he started rubbing himself against the wetness until she dug her fingers into his biceps and pulled at him even when she bucked her hips and arched her back and rolled her eyes back into her head.

She didn't demand, or tell him to finally finally, finally slip inside. She didn't say anything at all, even when he felt it screaming on her skin. She didn't say it, because she didn't ask anything of him. She only wanted what he was willing to give.

Yet her cry was more of a broken howl when he finally pushed inside. When he finally felt the exquisite agony of slipping home, stretching her out and filling her up, just to push back in, again and again, a little harder, a little more.

It had been a while until they'd finally had sex, indeed. But the wait made for the kind of raw, excessive and intense first night that he wouldn't have dared to hope for.

Though the first time he'd felt her lips around his tip was another story altogether.

So, why this story?

I ranted on tumblr a while ago, how much I dislike it when Usagi is portrayed as sexually shy or timid. Because in my opinion, Usagi wouldn't be. This is a girl who knows to unapologetically indulge in the things that bring her joy. The girl who eats and sleeps with wanton, who falls asleep drooling over romantic and saucy shoujo manga. She would not be sorry about it – or shy or timid.

The person who would be timid and shy, though, in my opinion, is Mamoru.

Mamoru is an orphan, who has never known any sort of intimacy, who has even learned – through his abilities as an empath – to be wary of touch of all kind. Someone who has learned to shut it all out. Mamoru, not Usagi, would have a harder time to know what he wants, when he's ready for or not, and to identify his own sexual awakening, or much less handle it. (Not to mention the little tidbit in canon, even, that his subconscious his future self is literally terrifying him with dreams of all the bad things that will happen to Usagi should he touch her. Just sayin.)

Anyway. Gender stereotypes have influenced a lot of how those two have been written in regards to sexuality or sexual prowess, if you will (in canon, as well), so… this story is aimed at that. This is Mamoru's sexual awakening, and his internal struggle.

Consent is definitely a big theme in this story, just note that obviously, consent is especially especially especially important in situations where it's not apparent if your partner is ready; and that it's not gender specific who has to give it and who has to ask. Normally, in stories with heterosexual pairings like this one, we portray consent as the guy checking in with the girl. But obviously, that can and needs to go the other way around when it's the girl making the first steps and the boy who's unsure. So, yeah, here it's she who has to tune and check in, and he who needs to be looked after. Of course, both parties need to look after each other, but foremost it's the one with the sexual agency, the one who's running the show and starting this jig, who has to make sure everything is still wanted. And as I said – I see Usagi as the one with the sexual agency in this relationship, at least in the beginning.

So yeah, granted, this little story passes the mark of "timid and shy" by a great ordeal, but, still fits him better, imo, than 'Mamoru The Porn Star', like we sometimes see him portrayed, anyway, no?

So, anyway. I know giving feedback on a smutty story can be really weird. But I would still love to know what you think of this, and the overall series, and which themes you'd like to see me work through, and so here's a little reminder that FF allows you to review anonymously, if you don't want you name on smutty fanfiction!