( by next time, very likely literal ones—albeit more obliquely written than those julius had stumbled across. the warm, languid look she regards him with now is a different thing entirely to the prim, pleasant and precise smiles she employs readily most days; a glimpse behind the curtain, at the sort of mind that takes notes, even now, even here. some self-satisfaction, and some straight-forward affection, buoyed by the fuzzy-around-the-edges feeling post-climax and enjoying the rebuilding anticipation of him knelt there.
the weight of his hands, the line of his shoulders. the shadow he casts, and how warm he feels between her legs. )
Are you in want, ( a lower, lazier voice than she has ever elsewhere used in his hearing, ) of a performance review, Commander Flint?
( if she uses his title like that anywhere else, they're in real trouble. she considers and discards several things that she might say, visibly, and instead: ) Tell me what you want.
( not that it isn't, in broad strokes, fucking obvious. )
[For what should be such an obvious answer, his subsequent study of her is blatant and fixed, thumb scuffing a slow methodical circle beneath her navel. It's genuine consideration in the face of impatience and the droning want humming under skin, the apparent picking up and putting down of compulsive responses even as a muscle in his thigh twitches against her in reply to the low sway of her voice.
(He's been told to say what he wants before, and has formed the habit of treating it as a real question, like a real thing.)]
I want you over me. [His hand sliding the length of her thigh, honing in compulsively on that arrangement of fingerprint bruises. The grin blooming crookedly at the corner of his mouth is as heated and firm as his fingers, not impulsive but hungry. He tugs her closer by his grip on her.] I want to see how you like to move, Madame.
( as much as she might have enjoyed the obvious answers—impatience given voice—she enjoys, too, this momentary slowing, drawn out like candle-wax sliding down over itself. (she might see that, were she to turn her head. she does not.) she means the question to have an answer, and the warm look becomes a smile as if he has—not cleverly passed some test, but perhaps demonstrated something she might have looked for without necessarily expecting.
muscle memory runs a shiver through her where his fingers slide and press, and she lets her knee rise a little in his hand before she pushes up onto her elbows, and then onto her knees, swinging her feet beneath her and rising sinuous into his space in a way that she would struggle to do anywhere else. )
Then,
( with a push—a firm one, not a tease, and she presumes under the circumstances he isn't going to thwart her even if he could—to his shoulder, her knee swinging over his thigh and the movement graceful the way something practised is, )
let me show you.
( sweat curls her hair around her face, and the rest of it tumbles down her back above him, a mess; her knees find the bedding either side of him and she flattens her hand on his stomach, considering her new vantage point with her head tilted, a mirror of the way he had studied her moments before. that hand slides lower, wrapping around his cock—the lazy stroke of her fingers in the process less purposeful than it is hello, again, I was beginning to miss you friendly—and holding him in place to guide herself down, her feet hooked backwards over his calves both to brace herself and to hold him beneath her where she likes him.
it is a slow, wet slide and then a more experimental series of incremental shifts as she finds the angle that she wants, just so. there is a moment with her hand in her hair and his cock in her cunt and some muffled sound hissing out through her teeth that it doesn't seem so terribly outlandish someone might have looked at her and thought she might look well upon a throne. )
[The draw of his breathing comes thick beneath her, his hands having immediately found their way to settle at her hip and thigh. Not that he needs the additional points of contact to feel the way she settles around him - the clutching little cant of her frame as she rearranges by degrees. She is low, liquid heat, the glow of the rift shard casting a strange shifting light in the wild patterns of her golden hair.
And if he was sturdy before, Flint is heavy now under her: a shifting plane of weight in the slow irregular adjustment of his hip and how it travels the length of him, the twist of his heel in the bed's linens bucking his calf against her foot. Not the kind of man to be swayed by the tip of a head, no. But maybe the kind who can't help himself when it comes to the studied way she takes him. There is something in all her sure intention that draws eye even when it's the heat and press of her body that should be the thing winding him into her by degrees. It's her all sharp and aware that has him twitching into her stark heat and prompts the slide of his hand - touching first where they meet, then the rough pad of his thumb to her clit.
( her inhale when his thumb presses is loud in a quiet room, the lazy sway of her above him accommodating first for the shift of his hip and then the press of his thumb and her toes hooked beneath his legs brace her to what seems at first no particular end. she takes her time to acquaint herself with the way that he feels inside and beneath her—catalogs every incremental shift of his body like tectonic plates. she knows to be messy, risky want what feels in the moment so deliberate as to be the only logical outcome.
she decides not to regret it, later, in the same moment that she rises up and rocks back down, rough and without warning and with her hand splayed over his to keep his thumb where she wants it in the process. )
[He doesn't have any clear expectation; he hasn't for hours, but certainly not for this - how she rises and falls, the set of her hand, the particular rhythm she sets. So it's not surprising how she takes him - the forceful, specific line of her body -, but it does light some satisfied spark, striking against that low impulse he'd felt at the first sight of her on her back: the urge to drag her to him by a hand at her slim waist, to fuck roughly into her and feel how she gives. Maybe the low sound he makes says something close to that effect, or maybe his thumb stroking under the brace of her hand or the dig of his fingers at her thigh do. With the first driving stroke of her, he goes all narrow and dark. Focus keen like a sharp point.
Pressing up to meet her is a question of degrees. But his hands on her are very sure, encouraging the pace.]
( the way that she's anchored herself against him provides leverage for the way that she moves, though less than if she were moving faster; taut lines of tension in her thighs where she takes him into her rough but not as quick as she might, the hand that doesn't wander up the line of her own body pressed to his hip just beneath her thigh. steadying. habitual; the gesture of someone who has bounced a little too hard and come off entirely a time or two before, and as much as he doesn't strike her as someone she couldn't laugh with in bed she is not, presently, interested in minor, amusing catastrophe.
she's interested in the look in his eyes as she catches glimpses of it through her own bouncing hair; the way all of his bare, freckled skin looks laid out underneath her in candle-glow. that she may have a new set of bruises to counterpoint the first, that the sound he makes feels like it's reverberating through her much as the stroke of his thumb. he makes that sound and she determines she will have it from him again, that pleasure is something she might secure with a hook and drag out of him forcefully—
her hair falls down her back as she tips her head, the harsh exhalation something like a sigh or some might-have-been a word, and it is a tangible thing when she lets go of whatever terrible sexual scheme is forming in her head to fuck herself faster and harder against that perfect angle he is pushing into her. her fingers clutch reflexively at his hip, and every gasp inches closer to something that might be petrana crying out above him. )
[His hand follows her through it, the stroke of his thumb increasingly insistent with every sound she makes. The shape of her breathing coming sharper coils tight in him, clutching as effectively as her body does. She has all those practiced points by which she secures herself and finds her leverage and her pleasure. There are other people she fucks like this, he thinks with a short panting groan. His hand at her thigh is its own point of leverage for driving her down to him. All the marks he wants to leave on her are just to communicate this want outside this bed, to whomever else is looking.]
Fuck, [in Trade, then cursing a bluer streak in Tevene. Half the heady satisfaction is just making noise under her, and the other is knowing she will understand what he means when he growls out a small litany in time with the course of her over him.
In the Imperium, Tevene speaks to power. It's good for being under a woman and telling her how he's going to have her after this, a heated promise breathed out in time to the stroke of his thumb about how if she comes before he does then he'll roll her over and fuck her into the mattress next. He can't remember the last time he had any reason to speak so much of it.]
( it isn't that he talks her to orgasm—she is doing a great deal of that work herself, and vigorously, and much of her attention has narrowed to the fine point of his thumb on her clit and the rhythmic way she tightens around him. the counterpoint of how deliberately he touches her there and the grasp of his free hand on her thigh, and the angle that she's rocking down onto him at, and how wet she's been since she took him in her mouth.
it's just that it's not not that, either. it's not just the content, but it's not not that. the low growl of it, that she understands him—that she understands him from hours of poring tirelessly over work she is certain began almost entirely as his inclination to humor her—that he has perhaps taken the victory from her if they don't make it all the way through his office hours without indecency, the way he shapes these words ringing in her ears.
it is entirely due to him that she can answer, with just one word: )
If,
( and then almost immediately undermines herself by falling forward and biting down on his shoulder as she clenches tightly around him and comes apart. )
[There's a thrill in it - how she goes she goes so taut around him, and the sting of her teeth, and the length of her body and where his hand is still trapped between them. It goes without saying that he breathes hard into the tangle of her pale hair and that his hand at her thigh holds her cinched in tight against him as she unravels. What is less given is the punch of self-satisfaction, felt hot between his ribs. Or how he finds he grins against her, somewhere between a low laugh and a warm growl in her ear before setting his teeth there.
There is a specific pleasure to saying something and watching it become real in his hands. Who doesn't find some reward in getting what they want? It's only monstrous if he isn't true to his word. And once she's taken her first breaths - whatever form they take - and her teeth have lost some of their edge, he endeavors to make good on his promises: guiding her over with an enthusiastic hip and hand, all that sturdy weight of him gone from willing foundation to eager flexing muscle.
If the rearrangment is less than smoothly choreographed, then who fucking cares. It doesn't feel awkward or fumbling in the moment. It doesn't seem like much of an interval between her flush over him and the reverse, his fingers tangling in her hair as he resumes her ready pace.]
( the space between panting on top of him and her back pressed into the mattress (half of it warm underneath her where he had been and half cool, tangled bedding) feels briefly weightless, and the moan he knocks out of her is mingled with something that resembles laughter. her hands splay on his back, sliding down as if she can pull him deeper into her; a knee hitched over his hip, a heel dug into the bed beneath to brace her against him.
commander flint is very direct, she hears herself saying primly, elsewhere, or some words to that effect: a man of his word.
that's probably why she's giggling into his shoulder, slick from an orgasm still contracting around him. this is stupid. they're being stupid. she wants to know, badly, what he looks like when he comes; she wants to see the shape of the smile that he keeps pressing into her skin. )
[What's stupid is how quickly this becomes unfocused, ceding into grasping hands and the press of her knee and how roughly he drives into the twitching heat at unorganized counterpoint with all her bright and breathless laughter, and how he grins gasping against her. They aren't senselessly young and eager for a quick hard fuck anymore than he is the devoted pirate captain on the rifter witch's leash they'd played at in Hightown, but it's a good story. It's a sly joke, worth all her hairpins arranged on his bedside table, and his shirt lost under the bed, and all the time its taken to tell it.
So:]
What's so funny? [A warm, demanding murmur at her cheek like he doesn't know. Like he's going to give her any opportunity to answer before kissing her.]
(you, she can't say into his mouth, i am—it isn't so urgent that she absolutely must, but he can feel the way she's still smiling against his mouth, the musical, lilting tone of the not-words that don't quite become anything between their lips. it might be a mess but it isn't, yet, it feels more like who she was and who she is meeting in the middle to agree firmly on something, finally.
the kiss is messy, is more kisses, is a lovely, warm contrast to the way she sets her hips against his and slides her hand down between them—not to touch herself but to wrap her fingers tight around the base of his cock shoving into her and press, insistent, determined pressure. )
We are, ( she says, eventually, into his shoulder. )Dieu.
( she thinks she might make it a third time before he finishes; she isn't certain, isn't hurried. it isn't as if she won't be well-satisfied regardless. )
[Her hand is rewarded with an arrhythmic jerk and a sharp sound presses into her skin that becomes first a groan, then an inhale like a laugh. And when he presses into her again, he is just as rough but finds himself lingering there fully in the sweet heat of her cunt and the firm grip of her fingers. Grinding against her hand and into her and relieved somehow by the shape his pleasure in her takes there.
It's been a long time since he laughed midfuck, and the thought - occurring to him distantly like something untouchable - should make his appetite for this go lopsided, but doesn't. She is warm and her breath is high and lovely and he is tired and wants so much to be exhausted for no better reason than enthusiastic screwing in the dark. When next he draws from her, he leaves her almost completely before driving back into the core of her heat. It is slower and sturdier and more full and doesn't require his hand on her hip so he can insinuate both arms under her. To press his hands between tousled bed clothes and the planes of her shoulders and use every part of both of them as his leverage.
He kisses her again. It's a better one this time.]
( the heat and weight of him is welcome, that warm space in between them where a laugh was filled instead with the press of her breasts to his chest and the way that his slower, more methodical pace draws sighs out of her that she hadn't expected. she likes the taste of him, the way his hip bones feel between her thighs, and that she can already feel this will wring one more little death out of her whether she'd entirely intended it to or not. the way what they were doing a moment before probably wouldn't have, and that it's—
that isn't the part that makes it better, exactly.
she drags her mouth to his ear when it's her own again, )
I want to see you come, James, ( quiet the way that intimate things are, the sound of what it feels like when she looks at him. )
[It turns something over in him - not the sound of his name in her mouth specifically, but the shape of it breathed against his ear. The sound he makes low against her neck in reply is the gentlest (and most stupid because it is honest) thing he's done for her all evening, for the entire length of their association. His hands flex around her. It's a testament to how close he actually is that he doesn't linger there for long before drawing back to his elbows, far enough to look at her and for her to see him there in the poor glow of the candlelight. It's proof how much he'd rather not be finished with her that he manages to push a few more steady, full strokes into her while studying the supple curve of her mouth and how shockingly dark her blue eyes seem viewed in the fits and starts between the press of his hip.
When he spills suddenly into her, it isn't because she asked him to. But it is what keeps him from burying his face into the tangle of her gold hair, what drives the low noise from him, what keeps him moving until he can't bear to retreat from being buried in her.]
( she's a breath behind him, a slower, softer thing than how she'd arched under his mouth or writhed on top of him; tightening involuntarily and dragging out the remnants of his end, holding his gaze with her eyes huge and her lips parted, her hand finally drawn from between the two of them so she can skid her fingers restlessly up and down his arms, incongruous with the purposeful way she's touched him.
one elbow braces behind her and she pushes up, curls her fingers around the back of his neck and kisses him like conversation. like an answer to something, or a conclusive argument. or just: how good it feels to do so, how hard she's breathing, how close it is to being altogether too much. )
[She smells like sweat and lilac water and their sex and tastes like he feels: drawn in and satisfied by it, the heated tangle of him over and inside her and her under and about him and both of them all alternating points of sharpening and smoothing, urgent and undoing. His hands curl at her sides, knuckles to her ribs, and he breathes hard into her until the distinct lines of them begin to reassemble.
Instead of shifting off her then, twisting out of the sticky heat of their closeness, Flint slides his arms back around her and settles with a pleased chuckle.]
( it's a deep breath that she takes—breathing them both in, all the taut lines of her going lax to fit against the firmness of him. cosy, how she nestles in when he wraps his arms around her, catching her breath slower than she relaxes, aware of without being in a great hurry to deal with slowly drying sweat and slick and semen.
(witherstalk, yes, but one thing leads to another and she's very busy and she hasn't always been methodical about it, but in nearly two years there's never been the hint of a happy accident and she could speak to a healer but she doesn't need to be sure, not yet. she is not concerned about the possible consequences of careless coupling, but there is a part of her that still needs to be not sure.)
being held by him is—comfortable. easy, like all of this even since he took her gloves from her has been easy, like none of what came before that was. the intimacy of it; not the sex but the chuckle. it's that that she finds herself fascinated by, for all that there is very little question—in her mind, at least—of this being a one-off. probably it should be. probably it shouldn't have happened at all. it pleases her that it did, and that she feels...
welcome. yes. that's the (difference) word.
she presses a kiss to his shoulder. )
I hope, ( a low, rolling amusement, ) that you were not expecting me to move in a great hurry.
( she is not completely convinced her knees will cooperate. )
[The low rumbling noise he makes in reply hums through the span of his chest. It's the comfort of what is a dubious privilege of having no where to be, no where else to go, no one to explain any absence to. Between the two of them, he's not the one who might have felt compelled to need to slip away from this room and so it's easy for him to say,]
I don't expect my opinion to change what you intend to do much at all, Madame de Cedoux. Though for the record, [tipping his head far enough to regard her with heavy eyes, the smug line of his mouth reaching out into the rest of his face] I believe there are likely worse beds.
[(What is the correct definition for that? This right now is shockingly simple and it will not make the work difficult, but it will make it different even if she didn't linger here.)]
( the smugness is what makes her laugh again, turning her face between his pillow and his shoulder.
she had decided to linger before she had set her foot upon the bottom-most stair of the tower; julius not unaware of this possible outcome, and the hour (having left just early enough) not yet so late that she thinks he will be sleeping. he is like her, that way—working late, taking it to bed. she means to speak with him before she sleeps, but to stay, yes.
the shape of what's changed will take time to see, entirely. how easy it feels is seductive. an echo of what might have been all with julius if she hadn't inadvertently given him an ultimatum in its place; something that she can be at ease with mostly because of the fact that she did. )
I would hear your opinion, ( she tells him, magnanimous, sparkling. )
['Is that so,' says the rise of his eyebrows and the tip of his chin.]
Then my opinion is that I've put very little effort into making this room comfortable. But the color of the bedclothes suits you, so you may as well stay.
[The slow, spreading line of his grin is close in the low light.]
( she is still smiling back at him when she presses the back of her knuckles to his jaw, a little gesture of fondness that she doesn't think before making. )
Commander, ( she says, very seriously, ) I shall take that under advisement.
( there is no particular intent to it, when she kisses him. it is simply pleasant to do so. )
[For a short while, it can be just that - pleasant and easy, her narrowness an appealing shape pressed across his forearms and into his hands and his weight settled over all of it. It's only once the sweat starts to go stale and his leg begins to go pin and needles prickling that he finally makes the effort required to untangle himself from her with a last grumbling groan of effort. A hollow thunk greets him as he shifts to lay alongside her. Some squirming produces a book from under his hip and with a grunt, Flint frisbees it toward the foot of the bed.]
Do you want a drink? [he asks her. His spare hand is loose at her hip, the absent stroke of knuckles across her skin.]
( at first her answer is just a pleased hum, her mind somewhere else, and then, )
My word, yes.
( even as her eyes track movement, absent and instinctive and probably at least slightly curious as to what title james flint takes to bed with him and then imprints on his own arse. )
Those evenings are so much duller now I do not drink at them.
( a little; he had seen wine in her hand, had seen her drink it. she had tasted it, certainly, enough to taste of it, but that is not drinking. she is not young and horny and impatient, but she doesn't look quite old enough for the wry nostalgia of her look, either. remember when i was fun, etc, except he doesn't, and anyway, this is fun.
is it that she's older than she looks or that her life was harder; a little of both. )
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the weight of his hands, the line of his shoulders. the shadow he casts, and how warm he feels between her legs. )
Are you in want, ( a lower, lazier voice than she has ever elsewhere used in his hearing, ) of a performance review, Commander Flint?
( if she uses his title like that anywhere else, they're in real trouble. she considers and discards several things that she might say, visibly, and instead: ) Tell me what you want.
( not that it isn't, in broad strokes, fucking obvious. )
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(He's been told to say what he wants before, and has formed the habit of treating it as a real question, like a real thing.)]
I want you over me. [His hand sliding the length of her thigh, honing in compulsively on that arrangement of fingerprint bruises. The grin blooming crookedly at the corner of his mouth is as heated and firm as his fingers, not impulsive but hungry. He tugs her closer by his grip on her.] I want to see how you like to move, Madame.
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muscle memory runs a shiver through her where his fingers slide and press, and she lets her knee rise a little in his hand before she pushes up onto her elbows, and then onto her knees, swinging her feet beneath her and rising sinuous into his space in a way that she would struggle to do anywhere else. )
Then,
( with a push—a firm one, not a tease, and she presumes under the circumstances he isn't going to thwart her even if he could—to his shoulder, her knee swinging over his thigh and the movement graceful the way something practised is, )
let me show you.
( sweat curls her hair around her face, and the rest of it tumbles down her back above him, a mess; her knees find the bedding either side of him and she flattens her hand on his stomach, considering her new vantage point with her head tilted, a mirror of the way he had studied her moments before. that hand slides lower, wrapping around his cock—the lazy stroke of her fingers in the process less purposeful than it is hello, again, I was beginning to miss you friendly—and holding him in place to guide herself down, her feet hooked backwards over his calves both to brace herself and to hold him beneath her where she likes him.
it is a slow, wet slide and then a more experimental series of incremental shifts as she finds the angle that she wants, just so. there is a moment with her hand in her hair and his cock in her cunt and some muffled sound hissing out through her teeth that it doesn't seem so terribly outlandish someone might have looked at her and thought she might look well upon a throne. )
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And if he was sturdy before, Flint is heavy now under her: a shifting plane of weight in the slow irregular adjustment of his hip and how it travels the length of him, the twist of his heel in the bed's linens bucking his calf against her foot. Not the kind of man to be swayed by the tip of a head, no. But maybe the kind who can't help himself when it comes to the studied way she takes him. There is something in all her sure intention that draws eye even when it's the heat and press of her body that should be the thing winding him into her by degrees. It's her all sharp and aware that has him twitching into her stark heat and prompts the slide of his hand - touching first where they meet, then the rough pad of his thumb to her clit.
She has his attention, drawn in slow circles.]
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she decides not to regret it, later, in the same moment that she rises up and rocks back down, rough and without warning and with her hand splayed over his to keep his thumb where she wants it in the process. )
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Pressing up to meet her is a question of degrees. But his hands on her are very sure, encouraging the pace.]
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she's interested in the look in his eyes as she catches glimpses of it through her own bouncing hair; the way all of his bare, freckled skin looks laid out underneath her in candle-glow. that she may have a new set of bruises to counterpoint the first, that the sound he makes feels like it's reverberating through her much as the stroke of his thumb. he makes that sound and she determines she will have it from him again, that pleasure is something she might secure with a hook and drag out of him forcefully—
her hair falls down her back as she tips her head, the harsh exhalation something like a sigh or some might-have-been a word, and it is a tangible thing when she lets go of whatever terrible sexual scheme is forming in her head to fuck herself faster and harder against that perfect angle he is pushing into her. her fingers clutch reflexively at his hip, and every gasp inches closer to something that might be petrana crying out above him. )
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Fuck, [in Trade, then cursing a bluer streak in Tevene. Half the heady satisfaction is just making noise under her, and the other is knowing she will understand what he means when he growls out a small litany in time with the course of her over him.
In the Imperium, Tevene speaks to power. It's good for being under a woman and telling her how he's going to have her after this, a heated promise breathed out in time to the stroke of his thumb about how if she comes before he does then he'll roll her over and fuck her into the mattress next. He can't remember the last time he had any reason to speak so much of it.]
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it's just that it's not not that, either. it's not just the content, but it's not not that. the low growl of it, that she understands him—that she understands him from hours of poring tirelessly over work she is certain began almost entirely as his inclination to humor her—that he has perhaps taken the victory from her if they don't make it all the way through his office hours without indecency, the way he shapes these words ringing in her ears.
it is entirely due to him that she can answer, with just one word: )
If,
( and then almost immediately undermines herself by falling forward and biting down on his shoulder as she clenches tightly around him and comes apart. )
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There is a specific pleasure to saying something and watching it become real in his hands. Who doesn't find some reward in getting what they want? It's only monstrous if he isn't true to his word. And once she's taken her first breaths - whatever form they take - and her teeth have lost some of their edge, he endeavors to make good on his promises: guiding her over with an enthusiastic hip and hand, all that sturdy weight of him gone from willing foundation to eager flexing muscle.
If the rearrangment is less than smoothly choreographed, then who fucking cares. It doesn't feel awkward or fumbling in the moment. It doesn't seem like much of an interval between her flush over him and the reverse, his fingers tangling in her hair as he resumes her ready pace.]
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commander flint is very direct, she hears herself saying primly, elsewhere, or some words to that effect: a man of his word.
that's probably why she's giggling into his shoulder, slick from an orgasm still contracting around him. this is stupid. they're being stupid. she wants to know, badly, what he looks like when he comes; she wants to see the shape of the smile that he keeps pressing into her skin. )
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So:]
What's so funny? [A warm, demanding murmur at her cheek like he doesn't know. Like he's going to give her any opportunity to answer before kissing her.]
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the kiss is messy, is more kisses, is a lovely, warm contrast to the way she sets her hips against his and slides her hand down between them—not to touch herself but to wrap her fingers tight around the base of his cock shoving into her and press, insistent, determined pressure. )
We are, ( she says, eventually, into his shoulder. ) Dieu.
( she thinks she might make it a third time before he finishes; she isn't certain, isn't hurried. it isn't as if she won't be well-satisfied regardless. )
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It's been a long time since he laughed midfuck, and the thought - occurring to him distantly like something untouchable - should make his appetite for this go lopsided, but doesn't. She is warm and her breath is high and lovely and he is tired and wants so much to be exhausted for no better reason than enthusiastic screwing in the dark. When next he draws from her, he leaves her almost completely before driving back into the core of her heat. It is slower and sturdier and more full and doesn't require his hand on her hip so he can insinuate both arms under her. To press his hands between tousled bed clothes and the planes of her shoulders and use every part of both of them as his leverage.
He kisses her again. It's a better one this time.]
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that isn't the part that makes it better, exactly.
she drags her mouth to his ear when it's her own again, )
I want to see you come, James, ( quiet the way that intimate things are, the sound of what it feels like when she looks at him. )
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When he spills suddenly into her, it isn't because she asked him to. But it is what keeps him from burying his face into the tangle of her gold hair, what drives the low noise from him, what keeps him moving until he can't bear to retreat from being buried in her.]
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one elbow braces behind her and she pushes up, curls her fingers around the back of his neck and kisses him like conversation. like an answer to something, or a conclusive argument. or just: how good it feels to do so, how hard she's breathing, how close it is to being altogether too much. )
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Instead of shifting off her then, twisting out of the sticky heat of their closeness, Flint slides his arms back around her and settles with a pleased chuckle.]
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(witherstalk, yes, but one thing leads to another and she's very busy and she hasn't always been methodical about it, but in nearly two years there's never been the hint of a happy accident and she could speak to a healer but she doesn't need to be sure, not yet. she is not concerned about the possible consequences of careless coupling, but there is a part of her that still needs to be not sure.)
being held by him is—comfortable. easy, like all of this even since he took her gloves from her has been easy, like none of what came before that was. the intimacy of it; not the sex but the chuckle. it's that that she finds herself fascinated by, for all that there is very little question—in her mind, at least—of this being a one-off. probably it should be. probably it shouldn't have happened at all. it pleases her that it did, and that she feels...
welcome. yes. that's the (difference) word.
she presses a kiss to his shoulder. )
I hope, ( a low, rolling amusement, ) that you were not expecting me to move in a great hurry.
( she is not completely convinced her knees will cooperate. )
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I don't expect my opinion to change what you intend to do much at all, Madame de Cedoux. Though for the record, [tipping his head far enough to regard her with heavy eyes, the smug line of his mouth reaching out into the rest of his face] I believe there are likely worse beds.
[(What is the correct definition for that? This right now is shockingly simple and it will not make the work difficult, but it will make it different even if she didn't linger here.)]
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she had decided to linger before she had set her foot upon the bottom-most stair of the tower; julius not unaware of this possible outcome, and the hour (having left just early enough) not yet so late that she thinks he will be sleeping. he is like her, that way—working late, taking it to bed. she means to speak with him before she sleeps, but to stay, yes.
the shape of what's changed will take time to see, entirely. how easy it feels is seductive. an echo of what might have been all with julius if she hadn't inadvertently given him an ultimatum in its place; something that she can be at ease with mostly because of the fact that she did. )
I would hear your opinion, ( she tells him, magnanimous, sparkling. )
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Then my opinion is that I've put very little effort into making this room comfortable. But the color of the bedclothes suits you, so you may as well stay.
[The slow, spreading line of his grin is close in the low light.]
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Commander, ( she says, very seriously, ) I shall take that under advisement.
( there is no particular intent to it, when she kisses him. it is simply pleasant to do so. )
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Do you want a drink? [he asks her. His spare hand is loose at her hip, the absent stroke of knuckles across her skin.]
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My word, yes.
( even as her eyes track movement, absent and instinctive and probably at least slightly curious as to what title james flint takes to bed with him and then imprints on his own arse. )
Those evenings are so much duller now I do not drink at them.
( a little; he had seen wine in her hand, had seen her drink it. she had tasted it, certainly, enough to taste of it, but that is not drinking. she is not young and horny and impatient, but she doesn't look quite old enough for the wry nostalgia of her look, either. remember when i was fun, etc, except he doesn't, and anyway, this is fun.
is it that she's older than she looks or that her life was harder; a little of both. )
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