Watching the line of Flint's back buckle forwards sends a lurch through him, a low down clench that coils tight. Threatens the integrity of stamina and patience, but also: exactly the right kind of kick he was after, the same kind of dizzy heart-skip that a sudden gallop inspires.
Not as drastic a change as that, in reality, but Marcus' panting is coming a little quicker until he reins it into something that matches the long strokes of his cock through that cleft of slick flesh, the clutching heat it meets once buried. The little broken off pieces of his name, barely heard where Flint smothers them into the bedclothes. Sweating now too, felt where the insides of his thighs rub against Flint's outer.
Sets his weight properly on his knees, drags his hand along the line of Flint's torso to his other hip. "I have you," murmured, breathed. "I have you."
His hands firm up, holding Flint's hips in that tilt, starts fucking down into it with more earnestness. Longer strokes, quicker, the impact of flesh meeting flesh all of a less punishing rhythm than he's set before, but closer to that than the slowly burning languid pace with which they'd started.
The strike of skin on skin paired with the rasp of Marcus' voice passes over him like a warm hand might stroke across his shoulders. Touch his neck and jaw. Wedging tight and hot into him, the knotted sensation in his belly clenching in sympathy. It is good. He'd needed Marcus' hand before, but like this—being driven, aching to be filled and getting it, each stroke forcing his sensitive cock across the bedclothes and biting a low catching sound out of him—he can see himself coming undone without. So long as Marcus keeps fucking him, and keeps telling him how good it is, he can see himself spilling hot into the covers and being happy to lay in it while continuing to be used.
The fragmented thought makes Flint groan out, warm and heavy into the thin summer blanket, and he curves reflexively into the hands at his hips.
"Fuck, like that," is a heavy pant, half obscured until he turns his face up from the blanket. "Maker—" That too drawn thick, not reedy. Something searching in the twist of muscle. When Marcus comes inside him, it's possible he might collapse heavily forward. Flint wants to be ready to draw him into a messy kiss across his shoulder if he does. "You're deep."
An affirming groan follows, a pulse of his hands clenching harder at Flint's hips before regulating. He could tuck his hand up under the other man, could tug at his cock, but also: no he couldn't. His hands are set so firmly, that rigid way tendons pull when chasing the brink of release, and any reconfiguring would see a break in what he's doing and he feels like it all might come undone if he were to pause.
So Marcus doesn't, keyed only into any twinge or cue from Flint that requires he do differently, and detecting neither. Vision hazing into tangles of eyelashes where his eyelids go hooded, then refocusing sharp and sudden to pick up bright and vivid details, like the trickle of sweat down Flint's ribs, the furl of his brow where he's twisted around enough for Marcus to see his face.
"Good," likewise panted. "You take me so well. So good."
Easy, for those words and other nonsense to spill from him, as if aware a little of the way they can replace kisses and strokes, grasps and fleeting eye contact. It works on him, works on him now, for all that the only part of Flint touching him is what he's touching himself. Words wend their way through, get a hold of him and squeeze.
For that matter, he could touch himself if he cared to. It would be easy to snake a hand into that space and grasp after the stiff shape of his cock, letting the long downward press of Marcus work it through his fingers on the way across the mattress. But there's little impulse to. The rasp of the bedclothes provides an echoed tease of friction, and the fucking—that catch of sweating skin and the weight striking down and the hot syllable slurred shape of Marcus' brogue—is plenty. Licks into him. Makes all the small hairs at the back of his neck prickle and encourages a rapid unwinding of braced tensions.
It's obvious when he stops going taut in reply to the stroke of Marcus and just starts taking it, the breath groaning and catching out of him as he's fucked down. It feels good, he must tell him, because it does. That he wants him inside of him. That he should spill into him. How thick Marcus seems, and how well he's filling him, and lower less clarified notes of approval as the sweat rasps between their thighs and that rhythmic jolt presses like a third hand at the small of his back.
He doesn't want to finish just yet. But if he did, he might be more sharply aware of Marcus' hands on him. The press and pull of bodies against the mattress. The clumsy arrangement of his own hands, one forearm having worked itself senselessly under his own chin so that when Marcus makes him moan he can feel the scrape of it in his throat against his own skin.
That desire for clarity almost manages to render some. There is a crisply defined moments where the senses tune sharp and he can listen to himself. The close up blur of the coverlet thickens into folds. Marcus' breathing feels like a pant pressed close to the ear. It occurs to him then that there is a low rocking whine from the bed frame, and maybe it had started when Marcus had worked up onto his knees, only that it's been all but devoured by their own sounds. Flint's attention makes to chase it, to ferret out the detail and sink his teeth into it. Divining the shape of it so sweet in the mouth that he groans out around it, definition scattering into broader forms as he starts to come in thick clutching pulses of muscle.
The creak from the bedframe doesn't relent, throughout. The heavy panting breathing, the rub of skin. Midway, a shift in hands: one sliding inwards, pressing into the curve of Flint's back, and the other finding a firm anchor at his shoulder. Held onto, pressed down.
A shift in breathing, an edge of desperation to it, a notching up in its intonation. Because it is plain enough to Marcus, the moment Flint starts, and it wrenches something sideways in him, wishing to sink into the sound of the groan that heralds it, or gather in closely to feel the way his body goes taut in the places that need to, but more than that, it tilts the ground out from under him, slides him to that inevitable finish.
Compulsion replacing intent, as Marcus fucks him through to his own climax which comes not a few more seconds after the whine in Flint's ears settles in that afterspace. The groans that fall from Marcus' mouth are shuddered out, stops and starts. Not choked back or strangled down, just clumsy, far more occupied with the sudden unravelling of his orgasm than moderating his breathing.
Long seconds where he goes still and buried hard inside of Flint, save for those fine pulses and twitches, muscles tensing across thigh and hip. Hands that had gone hard and demanding now loosening, leaving behind red where his fingers had bit in. A sound that starts with F, either Flint's name or something else, lost on the exhale.
And yes, buckling down, the hand at Flint's back slipping round to the ribs.
They'd been bitingly tender seconds, very aware of the warm oil slide and the burn of gripping fingers—not too wrung out from the effects of orgasm to be ignorant of the sensation of these things. Merely absorbing them, scraped raw by the sudden specificity. He finds he is equal parts satisfied and grateful as Marcus turns halting and twitching, and ultimately comes down across him with the long line of his weight and the flattened palms of easing hands.
Flint, driven flat to his belly and gone slack there in the loose jointed space of post-climax, groans under the press. For all that his cock might be spent, the sensation of being filled is still significant. Even if it wasn't, all the sweat and trembling exertion spent between them prickles at the senses in a way that would seem to require a mark of approval.
Hence: under Marcus, Flint turns his face. Clumsily lifts and shifts his shoulder by that half degree. He'd mapped out this angle before; the spare measure of height Marcus has on him makes soliciting a kiss not impossible.
Marcus slides his hand up from the ribs, around, bracing up under that shoulder when he feels Flint begin to twist around that half-measure. Recognises it for what it is and makes a rough sound of approval and gratitude, shifting that hand further up under to help brace against Flint's jaw as he moves to meet him.
The kiss he presses to his mouth is familiar, having traded a good number of them in these close moments after. A little loose and lazy but earnest, and he gives a growled sounding rumble of satisfaction for the sense of it while still buried in Flint. It strokes the ego like a petting hand compelling a cat to stretch, languishing under it.
Affection, too, in the press of the kiss and the lay of his hand. His other arm loosely folds up around Flint's torso, a cozier kind of embrace than they typically enjoy.
It's not dissimilar from having Marcus stood behind him with a hand wrapped about his chest. It should put him immediately in the mind of a cobalt burnished evening in a low tent, the cool arid night of the Anderfels kept at bay by the canvas and the candlelight and, briefly, another body shifting close. This, he should think, should be what he'd wanted then.
But he doesn't think of that tent in the Anderfels here amidst the loose shape of Marcus' arms, under that lazy pressing kiss while ensconced in the rumpled sex warm bedclothes. Because it isn't what he'd wanted then. Nevermind what he'd said about riding Marcus on the cot, he'd just wanted that closeness with all their clothes still on and the sensation of being a familiar shape under the fan of someone's fingers. Not chaste, and not platonic. Just—
Not lying in a bed, smelling of sweat and sex and very satisfied with it. The two things are unrelated points, and the one doesn't draw the eye to the other (at present, at least) just because the shape that Marcus' arm bends to happens to be similar.
He kisses him slowly and a half dozen times, though dividing them into distinct parcels is less effective than just marking the fact of mouth against mouth for some measure as the sweat cools on the back of his neck. Then Flint slackens. He lets himself lay his cheek back on the linens, and huffs out a heavy breath that isn't a laugh but also is near to one.
"That was good," he says, plain under Marcus' weight. A more rational tenor, stripped of the insensible impulse that trends in the direction of complimenting Marcus' dick.
If Marcus feels some spark of warmth at these words, it isn't (this time) from some swell of ego or pure self-satisfaction. Under him, Flint relaxes, murmurs that, and there's a private warm curling grasp lodged somewhere beneath the ribcage, the pleasure in having no small part in putting Flint in this state, to say nothing of himself, the state Flint has put him in in return.
He lifts his chin, grazes a kiss across Flint's temple, and sets about reordering them both. A hand tucking down to guide himself out, carefully, although there is little to help the natural twinge of it, that feeling of coolness where run-off fluid finds sweat drying on the skin. He's come to cherish, just a little, the small indignities around these entanglements. Of making a mess of a bed and laying in it, both figuratively and otherwise.
On that note, he doesn't stray far. He returns an arm wound around Flint, and while he slides his weight off of the other man's back, he settles near, a leg still half draped over the backs of his thighs. Not quite willing to let him out from his grasp just yet, nor broaden too much the space they've created.
"Still is," he says, easing himself down with an arm folded beneath his head, mostly to get it out of the way, and also to lay as Flint is laying. Resting in that sudden uncoiling of tension, where muscles are still second-guessing whether they can relax, while his bones are heavy already.
"Mm," he says, where 'Mm' is a low rumble of something like agreement and a way of rationalizing not moving much at all even as Marcus shifts over. He is pleasantly sticky with sweat, and Marcus' orgasm, and whatever dregs of his own that his body has managed to produce. Moving now will only serve to transmute those things into registering as an irritant instead of the clinging sensations of being well fucked.
Anyway, there is the sprawl of Marcus' leg across him to consider.
Flint shifts his face on the prop of his forearm, fingers idly gathering the pillow edge flattened under his weight closer in. His other hand comes clumsily unfolded from where he'd allowed his arm to buckle and his touch, when it finds the back of Marcus' neck, has a heavier cuffing quality more than it does tenderness. But a little of that too, along with a bite of sluggish humor—patting him like a horse.
The following snort of an exhale is not properly horse-like, just sluggishly humoured. Heavily cuffing with a little bit of affection is plainly acceptable, eyes closing for an extended few moments as Marcus lays there and breathes. And if he does that, then the drape of arm and leg can see almost incidental, a convenient kind of position to settle into. His hand does curl in loosely, scuffing the backs of his knuckles against Flint's shoulderblade.
"What do you want to do now?" he asks, a murmur in the laziest pronunciation with a subtle slant of suggestion that it's almost a joke. Like Fuck, again could possibly be on the table, permitting time. (Did they fuck and sleep and read straight through supper? Maybe. The greater lightsource in the room are the candles, to Marcus' estimation.)
Maybe if they get six or so hours of laying here, opportunity will again present itself.
Here, a lower thicker sound becoming a huff of breath—a laugh made all lazy across his forearm and into the worn warm surface of the pillow halfway under him. That hand remains set across the back of Marcus' neck, too loosely strung to bother with removing it and nowhere better to really fit his arm between them even if he weren't.
"I don't have any idea," Flint says, an easy rumble momentarily untroubled by the concept of time and ordering it. This is a considerable concession whether the man next to him realizes it or not. But give him a moment to think. He may be able to scrape together something to consider given a few more seconds spent idle on his belly.
The long breath out of Marcus is sympathetic to this answer. The curled hand resting lightly on Flint's back flattens out, unobtrusively feeling out swoop of bone and muscle. A kind of patting, although it could nearly feel like a means of keeping his hand occupied or of taking opportunity to feel something interesting over rather than transmitting intent. Feeling out scar tissue, following it with a fingertip.
Seven hours at a push, maybe.
Except there is a very satiated looseness in limb and spine, giving no indication of being left wanting, or being very interested in moving for the next few minutes. The hand absently left on the back of his neck is a comfortable weight of contact, satisfying the impulse to seek out more of that.
(But it might be nice to roll Flint backwards and pursue more long, lazy kisses, to tangle up together and soak up whatever's left. If Marcus craved it a little more, he might insist upon it. If he hadn't already indulged in so much, maybe. Extended gestures of intimacy without the purpose being to fuck soon after.
No, he'll lay here rather than flip Flint around where he's laying so comfortably and heavy on his belly. The impulse tucked away, expressed in the bend of knee, the turn of his hand.)
There's something stupid and boyish about this—irresponsible and lazy, this alignment of bodies in the midst of rumpled bedclothes and the casual lay of limbs and palms and cheeks against angled forearms. It feels a little like sunlight on the back of the neck. The prickle of salt air and the sway of a hammock. He allows himself to loiter in that seductively idle space for—
However long. It is not an incidental period of time in which his breathing evens and lengthens and the blurred edge quality of satisfaction is permitted to regulate and gently sharpen back in the direction of reality in which the bed is a little over warm, and the clinging of sweat and come chafes a little. And where, eventually, a more conscious working of thought finds him.
Flint breathes in and out a heavy half dozen measures. Then he draws his hand from the back of Marcus' neck and unfolds his other arm, making to lever himself partly up from the twist of the pillow. Partly over, up onto his side (facing Marcus rather than away) so he might examine the mess they've made of him and the bed.
A huffed out breath, a laugh. This is fucking absurd.
Consciousness bristles in Marcus at that first sign of Flint stirring—not that either of them were sleeping, but there had been a comfortable sort of trance-like quality to this idleness that means that when Flint's breathing changes, Marcus' awareness of it rises lazily to meet him. The equivalent of a lounging dog swiveling an ear in that direction, otherwise unmoving.
Doesn't otherwise move until Flint does, and then folds his leg back, draws his arm in. Eyeline pricking up to Flint's face as he sits up some, and then down to follow Flint's.
An echoed sound, fainter.
His legs draw across the covers as he raises up to sit. "Here," he says, but moves off, bare foot finding the ground and avoiding the strewn about boots, gaiters, pants, shirts—also absurd—in pursuit of where he last remembers Flint keeping water in the room.
There is indeed a pitcher loitering by the basin and a cloth there as well—both idly arranged (and the one half emptied) with the affect of having been thoughtlessly set aside. Flint had probably shaved his cheek there not so very many hours ago.
Meanwhile in the bed, the man himself rolls further over onto his back and props himself on both elbows where he might survey the wreck they've made of the room (or, the lithe line of Marcus' body as he crosses it). That is he going to be pleasantly stiff come morning, is a vague thought, having worked every muscle from hooking calf to curving shoulder after having spent a number of weeks in transit doing nothing at all of consequence.
"They'll be suspicions in the laundry," is a joke, and also true.
That does earn a laugh (both on account of being a joke and also true), a dryly smokey chuckle as Marcus empties the pitcher into the basin, barely above the sound of water splashing. It's warm enough in the room that he doesn't feel compelled to heat it, bare skin prickling pleasantly in the contrasting coolness from skin contact and sweat-warm sheets, so just collects the cloth and picks up the basin to draw it nearer.
He lifts his chin towards the side table, indicating Flint should make himself useful and clear a space.
"Glad ones," he suggests. "Good tidings, if the Commander of Riftwatch is finding some spare time for himself."
Fucking each other is good for morale, is all he's saying.
"Meanwhile, a full schedule would be worth some concern," may have a skeptical slant to it, but isn't strictly disagreement. He levers himself up. The pitcher of oil and the array of candles, and a book laid aside are reorganized on the side table to afford some room for the basin. Flint himself shifts to make similar accomodations for Marcus at the edge of the bed.
Sure. Morale. That's what it's good for.
(Nevermind the warm flare of satisfaction in his belly that sparks after the shape of Marcus' amusement.)
And maybe not the laundry staff, who have their fair amount of soiled sheets to speculate or pointedly not speculate about every other day. Marcus settles in the space made for him, and there is an empty space where the impulse to get clean and get dressed should exist. Normally some sense of modesty starts to creep back in without some form of justification for casual nakedness, and it likely will, but is slow in doing so, here.
In part, because there is also no impulse to see himself set back to order and out the door. The desire to linger. Also, it seems only fair to cede the basin to Flint in this moment.
For all that he's never made much habit of lying about naked in the aftermath of their encounters, there has never been the sense that Flint is much for the prickling guilt of propriety. Reclined there in the tangle of bed clothes, one knee having fallen idly open, he doesn't hesitate to reach after the cloth and drape past the basin's lip, or to apply the dripping cloth to his belly, and his softened cock, or down between his legs.
Anxieties over bared skin and it blasé treatment apparently isn't a habit; and why should it be? Surely a ship isn't fertile grounds for such an impulse to grow in.
"Go on," is not a question, but it is an invitation. A hip is raised in order for him to get a better reach at himself. The cloth is rinsed and wrung.
The resting of a heel against the edge of wooden bedframe, just past the sit of the mattress, raises a knee in a way that could be propriety, but barely constitutes as such. Dignity, maybe, more so than modesty. An idle sweep of a hand has, also, done something towards fixing his hair, while Flint runs wet cloth over himself.
"I could come back tonight if you want company in your bed," is straight forward. "Late enough, so I won't be sighted. And then there's the morning," and a flick of a glance has some fine barb of humour to it, "and rather than pick my boots up before the sun's risen, I could bring my things in here, pass through before your first appointment if you send the boy on an errand."
He drops his focus to the wash cloth, judging whether he wishes to use that one or find a second, decides he won't be too precious after everything, while he adds, "Spare us a little time."
Settling back into the bed linens and on the prop of his elbows, Flint gives the line of his own frame a significant look before he glances back to Marcus. "Well considered as that may be," he says, arch and dry in that lurking humor fashion. "I doubt I'll manage to be of any further use to you tonight."
They've made some considerable efforts this afternoon, and one of them is more old than not.
(Is not, any of it really, the point. He knows that.)
Marcus obliges that long look with a quicker one of his own. Amusement is sparer, this time, sunk back into barely perceptible twinges, something more narrowed once he looks back up to Flint's face. Still present, though. An 'mm' of acknowledgment.
He could say something like your bed is much nicer to sleep in, but that wouldn't be any more honest of him, would it? Even veiled in returning dry humour. He could point out that Flint could be of use to him (what a phrase) in the morning, and while it isn't beyond his scope of consideration—
"I meant only sleeping," Marcus says instead. "As far as tonight goes."
A low rumble of acknowledgement, the slow collapse of an elbow. Flint allows himself to settle slightly further back into the unevenly laid pillows, and, with a flick of his attention, to survey the water beading against his skin. To roll over and briefly chase tracing the cut of Marcus' thigh before his eyes lift and wander back to the man's face. This in a glance, little more than a moment's flickering assessment.
He isn't devoid of humor when he asks, "Will it bother you if I refuse?" though there is something low and even handed in it. Genuinely curious, made too loose jointed and limbed to scrape his guard up, maybe.
(Maybe. There are more transparent things he might have impulsively provided in answer, thought and summarily discarded.)
There is an incidental, not-deliberately mutual flicker of his focus in return, where Flint sinks back. It's a tempting kind of sight, although Marcus could not in good conscience identify what part of him is tempted, as spent as the other man.
His focus draws back up at that question, something incisive in the quick analysis he seems to make of Flint's expression. Relaxes off of that, and spends a beat of silence considering the value of a quicker question. If yes feels more true than no, or the other way around.
It feels more accurate when he lands on, "I can swallow the disappointment," tinged with an echoed kind of humour, a thin guarding veneer over what is nevertheless a true thing. A world where he doesn't have to get everything he wants.
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Not as drastic a change as that, in reality, but Marcus' panting is coming a little quicker until he reins it into something that matches the long strokes of his cock through that cleft of slick flesh, the clutching heat it meets once buried. The little broken off pieces of his name, barely heard where Flint smothers them into the bedclothes. Sweating now too, felt where the insides of his thighs rub against Flint's outer.
Sets his weight properly on his knees, drags his hand along the line of Flint's torso to his other hip. "I have you," murmured, breathed. "I have you."
His hands firm up, holding Flint's hips in that tilt, starts fucking down into it with more earnestness. Longer strokes, quicker, the impact of flesh meeting flesh all of a less punishing rhythm than he's set before, but closer to that than the slowly burning languid pace with which they'd started.
"Oh, fuck," groaned out. "Fuck that's good."
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The fragmented thought makes Flint groan out, warm and heavy into the thin summer blanket, and he curves reflexively into the hands at his hips.
"Fuck, like that," is a heavy pant, half obscured until he turns his face up from the blanket. "Maker—" That too drawn thick, not reedy. Something searching in the twist of muscle. When Marcus comes inside him, it's possible he might collapse heavily forward. Flint wants to be ready to draw him into a messy kiss across his shoulder if he does. "You're deep."
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So Marcus doesn't, keyed only into any twinge or cue from Flint that requires he do differently, and detecting neither. Vision hazing into tangles of eyelashes where his eyelids go hooded, then refocusing sharp and sudden to pick up bright and vivid details, like the trickle of sweat down Flint's ribs, the furl of his brow where he's twisted around enough for Marcus to see his face.
"Good," likewise panted. "You take me so well. So good."
Easy, for those words and other nonsense to spill from him, as if aware a little of the way they can replace kisses and strokes, grasps and fleeting eye contact. It works on him, works on him now, for all that the only part of Flint touching him is what he's touching himself. Words wend their way through, get a hold of him and squeeze.
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It's obvious when he stops going taut in reply to the stroke of Marcus and just starts taking it, the breath groaning and catching out of him as he's fucked down. It feels good, he must tell him, because it does. That he wants him inside of him. That he should spill into him. How thick Marcus seems, and how well he's filling him, and lower less clarified notes of approval as the sweat rasps between their thighs and that rhythmic jolt presses like a third hand at the small of his back.
He doesn't want to finish just yet. But if he did, he might be more sharply aware of Marcus' hands on him. The press and pull of bodies against the mattress. The clumsy arrangement of his own hands, one forearm having worked itself senselessly under his own chin so that when Marcus makes him moan he can feel the scrape of it in his throat against his own skin.
That desire for clarity almost manages to render some. There is a crisply defined moments where the senses tune sharp and he can listen to himself. The close up blur of the coverlet thickens into folds. Marcus' breathing feels like a pant pressed close to the ear. It occurs to him then that there is a low rocking whine from the bed frame, and maybe it had started when Marcus had worked up onto his knees, only that it's been all but devoured by their own sounds. Flint's attention makes to chase it, to ferret out the detail and sink his teeth into it. Divining the shape of it so sweet in the mouth that he groans out around it, definition scattering into broader forms as he starts to come in thick clutching pulses of muscle.
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A shift in breathing, an edge of desperation to it, a notching up in its intonation. Because it is plain enough to Marcus, the moment Flint starts, and it wrenches something sideways in him, wishing to sink into the sound of the groan that heralds it, or gather in closely to feel the way his body goes taut in the places that need to, but more than that, it tilts the ground out from under him, slides him to that inevitable finish.
Compulsion replacing intent, as Marcus fucks him through to his own climax which comes not a few more seconds after the whine in Flint's ears settles in that afterspace. The groans that fall from Marcus' mouth are shuddered out, stops and starts. Not choked back or strangled down, just clumsy, far more occupied with the sudden unravelling of his orgasm than moderating his breathing.
Long seconds where he goes still and buried hard inside of Flint, save for those fine pulses and twitches, muscles tensing across thigh and hip. Hands that had gone hard and demanding now loosening, leaving behind red where his fingers had bit in. A sound that starts with F, either Flint's name or something else, lost on the exhale.
And yes, buckling down, the hand at Flint's back slipping round to the ribs.
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Flint, driven flat to his belly and gone slack there in the loose jointed space of post-climax, groans under the press. For all that his cock might be spent, the sensation of being filled is still significant. Even if it wasn't, all the sweat and trembling exertion spent between them prickles at the senses in a way that would seem to require a mark of approval.
Hence: under Marcus, Flint turns his face. Clumsily lifts and shifts his shoulder by that half degree. He'd mapped out this angle before; the spare measure of height Marcus has on him makes soliciting a kiss not impossible.
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The kiss he presses to his mouth is familiar, having traded a good number of them in these close moments after. A little loose and lazy but earnest, and he gives a growled sounding rumble of satisfaction for the sense of it while still buried in Flint. It strokes the ego like a petting hand compelling a cat to stretch, languishing under it.
Affection, too, in the press of the kiss and the lay of his hand. His other arm loosely folds up around Flint's torso, a cozier kind of embrace than they typically enjoy.
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But he doesn't think of that tent in the Anderfels here amidst the loose shape of Marcus' arms, under that lazy pressing kiss while ensconced in the rumpled sex warm bedclothes. Because it isn't what he'd wanted then. Nevermind what he'd said about riding Marcus on the cot, he'd just wanted that closeness with all their clothes still on and the sensation of being a familiar shape under the fan of someone's fingers. Not chaste, and not platonic. Just—
Not lying in a bed, smelling of sweat and sex and very satisfied with it. The two things are unrelated points, and the one doesn't draw the eye to the other (at present, at least) just because the shape that Marcus' arm bends to happens to be similar.
He kisses him slowly and a half dozen times, though dividing them into distinct parcels is less effective than just marking the fact of mouth against mouth for some measure as the sweat cools on the back of his neck. Then Flint slackens. He lets himself lay his cheek back on the linens, and huffs out a heavy breath that isn't a laugh but also is near to one.
"That was good," he says, plain under Marcus' weight. A more rational tenor, stripped of the insensible impulse that trends in the direction of complimenting Marcus' dick.
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He lifts his chin, grazes a kiss across Flint's temple, and sets about reordering them both. A hand tucking down to guide himself out, carefully, although there is little to help the natural twinge of it, that feeling of coolness where run-off fluid finds sweat drying on the skin. He's come to cherish, just a little, the small indignities around these entanglements. Of making a mess of a bed and laying in it, both figuratively and otherwise.
On that note, he doesn't stray far. He returns an arm wound around Flint, and while he slides his weight off of the other man's back, he settles near, a leg still half draped over the backs of his thighs. Not quite willing to let him out from his grasp just yet, nor broaden too much the space they've created.
"Still is," he says, easing himself down with an arm folded beneath his head, mostly to get it out of the way, and also to lay as Flint is laying. Resting in that sudden uncoiling of tension, where muscles are still second-guessing whether they can relax, while his bones are heavy already.
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Anyway, there is the sprawl of Marcus' leg across him to consider.
Flint shifts his face on the prop of his forearm, fingers idly gathering the pillow edge flattened under his weight closer in. His other hand comes clumsily unfolded from where he'd allowed his arm to buckle and his touch, when it finds the back of Marcus' neck, has a heavier cuffing quality more than it does tenderness. But a little of that too, along with a bite of sluggish humor—patting him like a horse.
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"What do you want to do now?" he asks, a murmur in the laziest pronunciation with a subtle slant of suggestion that it's almost a joke. Like Fuck, again could possibly be on the table, permitting time. (Did they fuck and sleep and read straight through supper? Maybe. The greater lightsource in the room are the candles, to Marcus' estimation.)
Maybe if they get six or so hours of laying here, opportunity will again present itself.
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"I don't have any idea," Flint says, an easy rumble momentarily untroubled by the concept of time and ordering it. This is a considerable concession whether the man next to him realizes it or not. But give him a moment to think. He may be able to scrape together something to consider given a few more seconds spent idle on his belly.
Make it eight or so hours.
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Seven hours at a push, maybe.
Except there is a very satiated looseness in limb and spine, giving no indication of being left wanting, or being very interested in moving for the next few minutes. The hand absently left on the back of his neck is a comfortable weight of contact, satisfying the impulse to seek out more of that.
(But it might be nice to roll Flint backwards and pursue more long, lazy kisses, to tangle up together and soak up whatever's left. If Marcus craved it a little more, he might insist upon it. If he hadn't already indulged in so much, maybe. Extended gestures of intimacy without the purpose being to fuck soon after.
No, he'll lay here rather than flip Flint around where he's laying so comfortably and heavy on his belly. The impulse tucked away, expressed in the bend of knee, the turn of his hand.)
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However long. It is not an incidental period of time in which his breathing evens and lengthens and the blurred edge quality of satisfaction is permitted to regulate and gently sharpen back in the direction of reality in which the bed is a little over warm, and the clinging of sweat and come chafes a little. And where, eventually, a more conscious working of thought finds him.
Flint breathes in and out a heavy half dozen measures. Then he draws his hand from the back of Marcus' neck and unfolds his other arm, making to lever himself partly up from the twist of the pillow. Partly over, up onto his side (facing Marcus rather than away) so he might examine the mess they've made of him and the bed.
A huffed out breath, a laugh. This is fucking absurd.
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Doesn't otherwise move until Flint does, and then folds his leg back, draws his arm in. Eyeline pricking up to Flint's face as he sits up some, and then down to follow Flint's.
An echoed sound, fainter.
His legs draw across the covers as he raises up to sit. "Here," he says, but moves off, bare foot finding the ground and avoiding the strewn about boots, gaiters, pants, shirts—also absurd—in pursuit of where he last remembers Flint keeping water in the room.
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Meanwhile in the bed, the man himself rolls further over onto his back and props himself on both elbows where he might survey the wreck they've made of the room (or, the lithe line of Marcus' body as he crosses it). That is he going to be pleasantly stiff come morning, is a vague thought, having worked every muscle from hooking calf to curving shoulder after having spent a number of weeks in transit doing nothing at all of consequence.
"They'll be suspicions in the laundry," is a joke, and also true.
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He lifts his chin towards the side table, indicating Flint should make himself useful and clear a space.
"Glad ones," he suggests. "Good tidings, if the Commander of Riftwatch is finding some spare time for himself."
Fucking each other is good for morale, is all he's saying.
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Sure. Morale. That's what it's good for.
(Nevermind the warm flare of satisfaction in his belly that sparks after the shape of Marcus' amusement.)
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And maybe not the laundry staff, who have their fair amount of soiled sheets to speculate or pointedly not speculate about every other day. Marcus settles in the space made for him, and there is an empty space where the impulse to get clean and get dressed should exist. Normally some sense of modesty starts to creep back in without some form of justification for casual nakedness, and it likely will, but is slow in doing so, here.
In part, because there is also no impulse to see himself set back to order and out the door. The desire to linger. Also, it seems only fair to cede the basin to Flint in this moment.
"I had a thought for logistics."
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Anxieties over bared skin and it blasé treatment apparently isn't a habit; and why should it be? Surely a ship isn't fertile grounds for such an impulse to grow in.
"Go on," is not a question, but it is an invitation. A hip is raised in order for him to get a better reach at himself. The cloth is rinsed and wrung.
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"I could come back tonight if you want company in your bed," is straight forward. "Late enough, so I won't be sighted. And then there's the morning," and a flick of a glance has some fine barb of humour to it, "and rather than pick my boots up before the sun's risen, I could bring my things in here, pass through before your first appointment if you send the boy on an errand."
He drops his focus to the wash cloth, judging whether he wishes to use that one or find a second, decides he won't be too precious after everything, while he adds, "Spare us a little time."
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Settling back into the bed linens and on the prop of his elbows, Flint gives the line of his own frame a significant look before he glances back to Marcus. "Well considered as that may be," he says, arch and dry in that lurking humor fashion. "I doubt I'll manage to be of any further use to you tonight."
They've made some considerable efforts this afternoon, and one of them is more old than not.
(Is not, any of it really, the point. He knows that.)
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He could say something like your bed is much nicer to sleep in, but that wouldn't be any more honest of him, would it? Even veiled in returning dry humour. He could point out that Flint could be of use to him (what a phrase) in the morning, and while it isn't beyond his scope of consideration—
"I meant only sleeping," Marcus says instead. "As far as tonight goes."
A flex of a shrug, quiet permission to deny him.
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A low rumble of acknowledgement, the slow collapse of an elbow. Flint allows himself to settle slightly further back into the unevenly laid pillows, and, with a flick of his attention, to survey the water beading against his skin. To roll over and briefly chase tracing the cut of Marcus' thigh before his eyes lift and wander back to the man's face. This in a glance, little more than a moment's flickering assessment.
He isn't devoid of humor when he asks, "Will it bother you if I refuse?" though there is something low and even handed in it. Genuinely curious, made too loose jointed and limbed to scrape his guard up, maybe.
(Maybe. There are more transparent things he might have impulsively provided in answer, thought and summarily discarded.)
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His focus draws back up at that question, something incisive in the quick analysis he seems to make of Flint's expression. Relaxes off of that, and spends a beat of silence considering the value of a quicker question. If yes feels more true than no, or the other way around.
It feels more accurate when he lands on, "I can swallow the disappointment," tinged with an echoed kind of humour, a thin guarding veneer over what is nevertheless a true thing. A world where he doesn't have to get everything he wants.
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