Is that so, breathed out against him; like they don't always want each other and don't always have each other. They had each other even when they didn't. They had each other before, when they were doing nothing but playing verbal chess, sending biting tests back and forth. They had each other in the dark, when they mourned so blindly.
They have each other - now, sticky and weak and comical, and Thomas doesn't think there's a happier moment in a thousand lifetimes than sweaty post-coital cuddling with someone you love so incandescently. He shifts over, putting them side by side facing each other with limbs still tangled enough to qualify as unnecessarily (vitally) smothering each other.
(Someone else will know. Does know. Money has already changed hands from at least one betting pool. That headache is not for this moment.)
"On your ship," yours, no matter who built it or paid for it or who else has ever been voted in charge of it, "you had blood in your mouth after a fight, and I wondered if you would taste the same, because I always thought something about you had that iron undercurrent. Beneath all the sea-salt I think is just part of your .. cosmic makeup, down throughout the center of your bones. You are the most.. perfectly elemental being and I," am laughing at myself now at this addle-brained rambling, "love you so completely."
It's the breed of supremely absurd thing that Thomas Hamilton- Thomas Barlow - just Thomas, first names and loosened collars and and now the sunburned backs of his ears, can make sound true because he believes it when he says it. In anyone else's mouth, it would be cloyingly sweet, overwrought. No one thinks that's true. But Thomas does, and so James believes it; that he could be all iron tang, the metal and smoke smell of gunpowder not just in his clothes but of his skin. Tell him anything, as long as Thomas is saying it.
"If you wrote that down," James says. His mouth is twitching behind his mustache. "It might almost be worth the paper you put it on."
He laughs then, low and full. In the tangle of their bodies, he kisses Thomas while grinning.
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They have each other - now, sticky and weak and comical, and Thomas doesn't think there's a happier moment in a thousand lifetimes than sweaty post-coital cuddling with someone you love so incandescently. He shifts over, putting them side by side facing each other with limbs still tangled enough to qualify as unnecessarily (vitally) smothering each other.
(Someone else will know. Does know. Money has already changed hands from at least one betting pool. That headache is not for this moment.)
"On your ship," yours, no matter who built it or paid for it or who else has ever been voted in charge of it, "you had blood in your mouth after a fight, and I wondered if you would taste the same, because I always thought something about you had that iron undercurrent. Beneath all the sea-salt I think is just part of your .. cosmic makeup, down throughout the center of your bones. You are the most.. perfectly elemental being and I," am laughing at myself now at this addle-brained rambling, "love you so completely."
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"If you wrote that down," James says. His mouth is twitching behind his mustache. "It might almost be worth the paper you put it on."
He laughs then, low and full. In the tangle of their bodies, he kisses Thomas while grinning.