['She smiles against you before tracing her tongue across the back of your teeth, fingernails digging into your back. Even though this, you know in some always-esoteric part of your brain, is fucking, it's never just fucking with Rachel; you are hers for the rest of your life: you would never know how not to be.' Strap-on smut; Faberry Week Day 3: Hickeys.]

...

i would eat my way to perdition (to taste you)

.

who taught you to write in blood on my back? who taught you to use your hands as branding irons? you have scored your name into my shoulders, referenced me with your mark. the pads of your fingers have become printing blocks, you tap a message onto my skin, tap meaning into my body.

—Jeanette Winterson, Written on the Body

…

You're always struck by the unspeakable poeticism that your skin bruises so easily. You suppose it always has, always has turned the blues and purples and grays of seeping loneliness: it's in your blood, you suspect, built into your cells and when they explode underneath your skin there is evidence that you reaccept. It's resignation—to (re)sign, if Yale has taught you anything—this supplementation of grief into something visible. A readable, scriptable catastrophe, right there underneath the part of you—skin—that is already dead, ready to become dust again, this without-beginning, without-end, another resignation.

Right now, in New York, surrounded by all of your books that contemplate this in all of their doubly translated pages—a grammar of a grammar—Rachel is sighing into your skin, her back pressed against the wall in your open living room. Her body—and in this, always, you mean all of Rachel—has been your undoing for as long as you can remember real desire, the kind unshaped and burning, the want, Elizabeth Bishop's moons in Rio; Emily Dickinson's infinite, shimmering dashes.

You tell Rachel these things, and sometimes you think she must understand completely when she sings. If anyone understands breath—the control, the spiro—it's Rachel, her lungs that will always be more powerful than yours.

They always were.

You're twenty-four, on your way to a doctorate at Columbia, and Rachel has recently won her second Tony; you don't believe in very much—life has worn that innocence away—but you believe in her. You start teaching summer classes in the morning, a course on the poetics of longing in contemporary performance, and you're always nervous for those days. The city rocks sometimes for you, and there's no way you'd live there if it weren't for Rachel, who calms you on the frantic days, gives you so much life on the others.

"Baby," she whispers into your neck. "Quinn."

In undergrad, Spencer once traced a hickey and then told you, "You, a parable of the sweetest sin."

You wonder about that from time to time, write it in so many of your sporadic and very publishable poems. You think about the guilt in your longing, about the lack of language.

So you have learned, so precisely, to kiss Rachel in these moments of ache instead of saying anything—so gently. You don't know if it's sweet at all, but rather powerful: Margaret Atwood—like salt. Like tears. Like oceans.

You are still learning how to love her, but your hands don't shake anymore.

"Please," she says. "Quinn, please."

You're rough now, because you want to feel her. You back away from the wall, push her shoulders gently. "Stay here," you say, voice low and rough.

Her eyes flash, and she drags in a breath and nods.

You walk to your bedroom quickly, take off your soaked panties and take one of a few strapons from your drawer, quickly pull it up your legs, tug it tight around your hips. You're close already so the pressure on your clit is always welcome. You don't use toys all that often—they're not particularly needed—but you know Rachel likes penetration, and you, surprisingly, almost, at first, like the power and ability to give her what she needs in that. You don't take long enough to feel ridiculous—like you did the first few times—with the hot pink dildo between your legs; it had been Rachel's choice, and you have since acquired less absurd color choices, but you know this is her favorite.

When you walk back out of the bedroom, Rachel is still against the wall, and a smile blooms when she sees you, eyes drawn all over your body before settling, like always in moments like this, on your lips.

"Yeah?" you check—Rachel isn't always a fan of rough sex, and you've not quite learned how to be gentle with a strap-on.

"Yeah, baby," she says, kissing you deeply before biting your bottom lip. "You too?"

She breathes it into your mouth, and you've no choice, nothing other than the heat pooling between your legs and the warmth of the smooth skin of her cheek under your scarred palm. "Yeah," you say.

She smiles against you before tracing her tongue across the back of your teeth, fingernails digging into your back. Even though this, you know in some always-esoteric part of your brain, is fucking, it's never just fucking with Rachel; you are hers for the rest of your life: you would never know how not to be.

You break the kiss and move to her neck, taking one breast in your hand and pinching her nipple harshly. She gasps and you can't help but smirk, but then she runs a hand through your hair and tugs hard, sucks your earlobe into her mouth. It's your weak spot, something you've never had an explanation for, but goosebumps quickly erupt all over your body and you don't even bother to try to fight back a moan. Her kisses down your neck are powerful, and when she moves to bite your collarbone, you hoist her up around you, legs wrapping around your hips; you're never more glad for the yoga and pilates and running and boxing you do to clear your head—because you're unexpectedly strong—than moments like this.

She bites out a, "Fuck," against your lips when you reach down and push the dildo inside her. You rock your hips, finding a rhythm. Her breaths get more sporadic, your kisses sloppier. She sucks on your neck with fervor before nestling her head in your shoulder. You can feel her shudder, all of her muscles tense—and you're so close, that's all it takes to cause your entire body to contract too. You come silently even as she breathes your name—you don't like to speak in those moments; words have always been too much for that brief glimpse of the glimmering Real.

You bring both of you down gently, slowing the pound of your hips until you feel her relax completely against you. You pull out, and your legs are shaking so you lead her—with still sloppy kisses and all—to your bed, taking off the strap-on and dropping it to the floor before settling in next to her. You close your eyes and kiss her until she pulls back slightly.

"You're so beautiful," she says.

You've never been good at accepting compliments in general, but beautiful has always been the toughest to allow yourself. But you are learning: "Thank you," you say.

She smiles—you've had to practice that response, rather than a default you're beautiful too or a simple shake of your head—and traces random patters along your shoulder.

"Never in a million years would I have believed someone if they told me when I was fourteen that in ten years time Quinn Fabray would be fucking me against a wall with a strap-on."

You laugh quietly—you are shocked at your life frequently, how much you have won. You don't believe in anything metaphysical, but sometimes you think this is something close to miraculous. "I didn't know what a strap-on was when I was fourteen."

Rachel rolls her eyes with a smile, kisses you again. "Thank god you've gotten some good education since then."

"The ivies are good for something after all, then."

"Snob," Rachel says.

"Didn't see you complaining a few minutes ago."

She laughs, and you are never happier than these moments—simple, frequent light moments with Rachel. They're strikingly intimate to you; your world is very serious sometimes, full of struggles with space, with your brain, with words and contemplating, as one professor in undergrad told you, all of the degrees of infinity. Rachel gives you that, deeply and to such heights, such levity.

"I love you," you say.

"I love you back," she tells you, then traces along your collarbone, up your neck.

"You have two hickeys," you inform her, reaching out and softly rubbing the red blotches above her left breast.

"You have seven," she says with a laugh.

You can't help but smile—it's common and expected; your lighter skin always reflects more evidence of the hurt of the world, but today the hurt was so safe, so lovely: pleasure, something you have only recently begun to understand more fully.

She moves her hand to sift through your hair, scratch along your scalp.

"Gotta give my students some indication that I'm cool," you say.

Rachel snorts. "You're the nerdiest, lamest person I know, Professor Fabray."

You kiss her without warning, deeply enough to elicit a moan. "Is that right, Miss Berry?"

"Mhm," she breathes against your mouth. "But maybe you could convince me otherwise."

You laugh. "Who would've guessed Rachel Berry would be so horny?"

"Speak for yourself," she says, trying to drag you on top of her.

You resist and say, "Later, baby."

She sits back and pouts.

You tuck hair behind her ear fondly. "Let's go for a walk and get some food? I'm hungry."

She looks infinitely pleased to hear you admit that—you don't often get the words out—and nods. "Yes ma'am."

She tugs you up with her, throwing a shirt in your general direction while she rummages through a drawer. You admire has ass, the dimples of her back, the sharpness of her spine, the stretches of smooth, unmarked skin. She doesn't mind your scars, but you, for so many unspeakable, profound reasons, are glad she doesn't have many, and the ones that are stitched into her are small, unremarkable, gentle, healed.

She hands you a scarf with a little smile, and she says, "Sorry about that, really."

You shake your head, kiss her swollen lips. "If all we are is bodies," you whisper, "I just want you to leave a mark."