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There’s a small, red mark near the of top Kathryn’s left buttock. He’s keeping an eye on the ground, watching for trip hazards, but it’s the bruise that keeps catching his eye.
They’re quiet while they walk. He’s tired. Kathryn, too, he thinks. She’d been sleepy against his shoulder in the turbolift, leaving his arm around her waist even though anyone could have been on deck six when the doors opened.
They’d spent a late night inching Voyager through a tedious electromagnetic storm. Kathryn had been slammed into her chair during an unexpected power surge, and he realises now that he hadn’t been thorough enough with the dermal regenerator. He'd been impatient, he supposes. Eager to be back in his own quarters, to be asleep, for it to be already today.
Kathryn walks steadily, if slowly, but he keeps a hand on her hip anyway; an attempt to counteract the human tendency to go off-course when blindfolded. The hood Kathryn wears is fitted loosely to her skull and covers her face. Occasionally the bottom edge will flutter, causing it to brush the collar of the loose shirt he wears. The breeze picks up as they make their way through the field bordering the forest.
Here is where, sometimes, he falls back and stays back, watching as Kathryn’s steps become smaller, less certain; watching the grasses, tall and wild, scrape her calves as she wanders a slow, inevitable circle. Kathryn’s black hood is a stark contrast to the high blue of the sky; the green of the field; her white, naked body. Despite their long familiarity, he is struck every time by her alienness.
They’re due on the bridge in a few hours and won’t have time today to linger. If they did, she would jolt when he went to her again. He knows this as surely as he knows his own instincts. Kathryn’s whole body would shudder when he found the pulse fluttering at her throat, the river between her legs.
It’s exquisitely tempting, the thought of sinking into Kathryn, giving them what they both want, but this will come later, once they’re back in quarters.
They’re through the field now and in the forest. Usually they’d be here in the evening, after their duty shift, and it would be midday. Today, as a nod to the change in schedule, it’s the same time on the holodeck as it is on Voyager. Early morning. The light that makes it through the trees is hazy; diffuse.
Sometimes he has Kathryn kneel at the edge of the clearing while he prepares, but today they stop next to the tree, the one with the branch that’s a good height. He takes Kathryn’s hand, and waits. When she tightens her fingers, he guides her to the trunk and lets go. Kathryn runs her palm over the rough bark and then offers him her wrists, one over the other.
He keeps him and Kathryn here, letting the moment spin out, timeless, before he binds her hands and has her lift her arms for him.
She’s facing the tree when he’s done, feet in line with her hips and planted firmly on the ground. He checks in. Kathryn is fine. More than fine, she says. Eager.
He skims his nails across her upper back; watches as her shoulders tense and then relax. He does it again, with more force, and she struggles this time to stay where she’s been put. When her chest stops heaving, he strokes the soft fabric of the hood where it covers her cheek. He’s wide awake now, his own anticipation building.
He scours the clearing until he finds a long, slender branch. It’s damp, like everything on the forest floor, but there’s no visible damage. When he presses it between his fingers, he finds there’s not much give. It’ll do.
He sets the stick upright to dry while he searches for a particular plant that grows in abundance here. He locates it by its small, bright berries and when he kneels to gather an armful, careful of the stiff, sharp-edged leaves, he is hit with the pungent aroma of the tiny violet flowers that grow as groundcover. Damp seeps through the knees of his trousers, but he stays where he is, listening to the chatter of birds; feeling the sweetness of the morning breeze on his face and neck and hands.
He wonders if she knows where they are, or if she thinks he programmes a random field, a random wood. She must know him well enough by now to know that he prefers to be in nature, whether it’s real or not.
They talk about what it is they’re doing, of course. Identifying this overlap in pleasure; creating this intimacy; building this trust. Sustaining it the best they can, out here. They talk beforehand, and afterwards, and he had supposed that they would talk about New Earth one day, but they never have. For all the times they’ve run this programme she’s never seen it, though she could look up the details anytime she wants. He's locked the parameters to everyone but her.
He could have his eyes put out and be put on New Earth and he would know exactly where he was. There would be no question. The months he spent there with Kathryn are seared on his soul.
He returns to her, takes her shoulder in one hand for balance as he rolls the rounded edge of the stick along the soft curve of her waist. He changes his grip; drags the sharp, pointed end over the marks his nails have made.
Then he stands back.
He needs all of this time that he spends with Kathryn, every second of it, no matter what they’re doing, but there’s something about this; something that he can’t put into words, something that exists in this moment, before they really begin, before he strikes her, that he craves.
He picks up the switch and when he puts it down again, Kathryn is a beautiful, rosy mess.
Looking at her, he doesn’t see any of the restraint he’s shown. He’s always careful with Kathryn but he hasn’t been this cautious since they’d started this, a couple of years after returning to the ship. The area below Kathryn’s shoulder blades is covered in his marks, and so is her ass; the bruise from earlier hidden in a field of red. Her whole body trembles. His own hand is shaking, until he clasps it tightly in the other.
He’s aware, they both are, that today she’s agreed to keep her welts, all of them, until after her shift. Sitting beside him on the bridge, she’ll feel it all day: what he’s done with her.
She will cry out, sometimes, when he strikes her: brief, intense sobs of pleasure and pain that he will forever desire. She rarely whimpers as she does now; not when he’s not even touching her. He wants her to keep doing it, keep making these soft little hurt noises, and when he asks, Kathryn says she doesn’t want to stop, not yet, so he turns her with his palms and gives the same careful attention to her front as he gave to her back.
He’s cautious, almost delicate, with her breasts, and concentrates mainly on her thighs. When he’s done, he rests a hand on Kathryn’s lower back, over her spine, and waits for her to calm down.
He hasn’t forgotten about the plant: the one he barely remembers from the planet; the one they’d never named, and he doesn’t think she has either. This, he always saves for when he’s gone as far as he dares with the switch.
He’s left enough room between the trunk of the tree and Kathryn that he can walk a circle around her. He can feel the heat beat off her even as he holds a fistful of plant above her skin. When he’s ready, he’ll drag the hard, spiny leaves over her body, tracing the lines of the work he’s already done.
For now, there is this: Kathryn’s breaths, harsh enough to hear through the hood; through the noise of the forest. There is Kathryn. There is the control he needs to keep over his own self, and there is anticipation and yearning, and a wild and fragile and delicate hope.