He is not a particularly fine boned man. Stood there in the lamplight and flecked by the shadows cast by Marcus' nearness, he cuts a sturdy figure in spite of the bruising and being stripped down to his small clothes. He is getting old, and the liquor is catching up to him where six flights of stairs between two and ten times a day isn't holding the impression at bay, and the sense of him takes up more space than he actually does. But it's true. He wouldn't have fallen that distance and lived. People are so very delicate, and the ones outside Circle towers so very breakable in the most literal sense.
—is not at all what Flint is thinking as he fits the back onto the stud earring, and sets it in the dish.
"I was going to try." There's a book on the side table and everything somewhere under those loose papers. But it's some Orlesian moralism doorstop, and may require more chewing than he's presently capable of.
He looks to Marcus. Meets his eye. They're stood near to one another again and the urge to sit his fingers against warm skin itches at him.
Not that he never does. Flint's book is even on his nightstand, in a different tower, but Marcus chose to be in this tower. Aware, too, of his own itch, of being confronted with bare skin he could touch directly instead of mediated through rumpled cloth, and when Marcus instead breaks from that nearness and moves for the bed, it's with the logic that the sooner they actually make it there—
He kneels onto it with a certain amount of proprietary confidence, snatching at a pillow to shove it across to what will be his side, the one with less light and paperwork. "But you can try, if you want," he says as he goes.
A huffed out breath, humor lingering on its edge, follows in Marcus' wake. Wow, thanks.
He lingers for a moment there, absently using one hand to pull at tight finger joints of the other as Marcus rearranged pillows and bed clothes. Studying the shape of his shoulder, and the loose fall of his hair over it. But it's only a moment. In short order, Flint moves to join him—folding back the coverlet, adjusting the pillows laid on this side still. The bed is sturdy enough that it hardly complains under two men's weight moving into it. And once they are there
Flint caps the hand lamp, and the thick dark pressed into the room's margins spill in to fill it. No books tonight.
That shock of unyielding black, until a second passes, and one can see the seam of grey where the curtains are closed and the moon struggling through patchy raincloud offers the barest hint of silver. But otherwise, it's consuming, comfortable, and a little new. They've lain together in darkness before, but not usually.
Marcus sinks down. He probably won't sleep right away, he knows, not unless his body decides he isn't quite done with sudden rushes of fatigue, but he'd already decided it would be good enough to lay near, a kind of quiet company.
All the same. He reaches across, lets the back of his knuckles find Flint in the dark—the slope of a shoulder, by the feel of it, then turning his hand on his wrist to find a place on the other man's chest. There, warm skin, muscle and bone, hair, changing textures. He knows with a rush that he would like to put his hands all over the other man, to feel him out like this in the dark, and that it barely registers as anything like sex—but not not at all.
He doesn't follow that urge with the rush he feels. A slower entangling, one that waits.
Marcus may not follow the impulse with any urgency; Flint, though, bends to it. For in the dark, that first shiver of contact sends a warm sensation swelling up after it; and there is the knot in his belly—tight still, behind the ribs—which wants for easing.
As he shifts down in amongst the blanket and worn thin pillows, Flint turns in answer to the exploratory flat of Marcus' palm. His own hand first finds Marcus' side, and then works up across to his chest. Creeps to clavicle and shoulder, and here is the rest of Flint following after his hand as he rolls over onto his side.
In the slate quality of the dark, it is impossible to parse Marcus in any level of detail to the eye. But he makes for familiar shapes under the hand, and a radiating heat amidst the cooler bed linens. It is easy, actually, to settle in very close against him.
His breathing is slow under Flint's hand, conscious of it in the way that this kind of proximity and an abrupt lack of visual information might encourage. Conscious of Flint, the weight and warmth of him nearer by. It is, in a rush, very good. Good to have company in his bed (or be company in someone else's bed), for form and solidity to be where he's been too aware of its absence.
He shifts to settle in nearer, hand finding its path up Flint's chest. Throat, jaw. In the dark, Marcus traces along his cheek with his thumb until he can find the corner of Flint's mouth. A guiding point, so that he doesn't miss when he kisses him with a panted out sigh of satisfaction.
It's warm and good, that tactile scuff of fingers and the featherlight sensation of gusted breaths. He rumbles low against the press of the kiss and the sound is fuller and closer in the dark. And when it breaks, Flint turns his face. Presses a bristly kiss to the inside of Marcus' palm.
That it doesn't do anything to settle that wound taut sense carried in his center is— inconvenient. In the same way that the flickering of desire that is primed by bare skin and the stirring associations he has with Marcus being in this room, in this bed, is inconvenient (he is tired, and the actual possibility of lumbering after a fuck seems remote at best). But there are worse things than to lay close to a person.
There is an immediate and undeniable pulse of something felt at that brush of a kiss to his palm, somehow sharper, more acute. Stirs something more physical and familiar in spite of (or in tandem with) how affectionate it feels, and Marcus' hand curls, thumb brushing light over lips, chin, still so close there in the dark.
The potential for frustration is fine, if it can be called that. There is enough liquor releasing itself into his blood to both have it burn brighter and eventually consume itself. There is a calculation to be made, in which Flint is tired (how tired) and he is not, and when he kisses him again, it's that touch more insistent, an answering sound from deep in his chest.
His hand has found a place on Flint's shoulder. Thumb pressing as he suggests, "Lay back."
Flint huffs a low breath across the other man's mouth and his hand, having found its way to the bend between Marcus' shoulder and neck, curves briefly close. Fingernails pressing gently at the nape of Marcus' neck, his thumb a steady if less firm form than the one being applied to his shoulder. A slow kiss answers him, moderating.
But after, he does obey that suggestion. Shifting over with hip and shoulder, fingers slipping loosely up the line of Marcus' arm as he settles toward his back in the dark. Here is that rapt, prickling sensation under the skin yearning for the sound of the bed linens rasping about the movement of limbs and, or the small sounds the mattress makes as they reorder themselves.
Marcus follows, a little. Rising up a little along the curve of his spine as opposed to a more pushy climbing over, though there's a satisfied weight to the hand that hasn't left Flint's shoulder. Presses a kiss to the corner of Flint's mouth, minding less being off the mark when the next one is a deliberate miss to, low on his chin—
The third one lands just over that ridge of clavicle at the same time as his hand moves from shoulder to belly, the whisper of sheets tugging along the edge of Marcus' elbow, drawing back.
"Let me," he suggests, mumbled there, hand stopped.
There is an instinct to duck his chin and helpfully realign Marcus' mouth to his that would have materialized if not for the southerly passage of that hand. As it is, he still lower his chin a half degree—an instinctive lying lower of focus toward the warm shape of the mouth at his skin, the thick sound of Marcus' voice in the dark.
(He is too near to really see well, regardless of how well his eyes have or haven't adjusted.)
"Are you trying to put me back to work?" has a slanted quality to it. Somewhere in the press of the night, something bemused like a smile must be tugging at the corner of Flint's mouth. It's not a refusal, his fingers shifting up off the mattress so his knuckle might lay loose against the line of Marcus' spine.
More movement, the mattress dipping where he puts some weight on a knee. The shift of the arm he has folded under him stretching out and up some, elbow to mattress to raise him up and over. The tickle of his breath at Flint's chest has a quality of a laugh to it. Presses a kiss where there's thicker muscle, lower still.
"No," has that same slanted quality, but sounds sure of itself, as he presses another kiss down. No, Marcus isn't demanding anything beyond what's already been suggested. His hand doesn't move much lower, but idles there, the sweep of his thumb feeling softer skin.
In answer, a low skeptical sounding hum and the gentle adjusting of his hip. It's an automatic kind of flexion, a delicate tensing and untensing of muscle under the motion of Marcus' thumb.
Somewhere in there—the straying of his hand, Flint's fingers playing up across the curve of Marcus' shoulder. In the dark, given the muggy quality of the moonlight through the weather and narrow slot window both, he is just a smudge of something lighter in a black field. But the sense under his fingertips is quite solid. Reassuringly so.
A hummed sound, satisfied with that answer, and his hand moves. Most of him moves, really, knees negotiating some territory around Flint's legs, the brief press of skin below the cuffs of soft breeches. A climb further down, the wandering path of those kisses continuing, although this one is a little clumsier, breathed through, sharply warm and damp.
This feels a little more like making up for lost time when Marcus was on the road as opposed to near dead or bedridden. The curl of satisfaction he feels certainly suggests itself as an answer to it. Scent and taste and feel instead of only sound, and that they lack sight doesn't feel like a lack, exactly, but a natural extension of the thing.
His hand moves, slipping down to palm over the front of Flint's breeches. Something negligent in it, as if not just in search for the shape of the other man's cock as he is interested in feeling it through the texture of soft cotton, feeling the stitch that runs there.
It lends a thick sense to the air, that dark. He is very aware of Marcus moving through it, as if he might sense the eddies of small currents in it caused by the shifting of covers or the warm trail left by a mouth over skin; his own elbow shifting as his hand remains light at the other man's bare shoulder; the way the room's air grows denser with breathing, an low exhale swirling in phosphorescent reply to the shape of Marcus' hand as it finds him through soft fabric.
I'll put my hands on you, he'd told Marcus nearly a week ago by crystal. He'd meant it. They were meant to find a room after a few drinks, and there he would have made a proper through study of every part of the other man in the lamplight—some abstract intent to see if Marcus could be made to ask for it ('Can I come?' he'd asked, and Flint has given the scraped sound of it serious thought in the interim).
So, in a sense, it should feel like wasted mental effort to lay here now in the dark with just his fingers at Marcus' shoulder, or to shift his hand to the more braced of the man's biceps where he might assert a grip, gently squeezing. To be touched, but only barely touching. But then he had thought, maybe, when they laid here in this bed tonight that he might just fit himself intimately close to Marcus and simply fall asleep in his company, and that prospect had seemed something of an even substitute for the other. He can touch him tomorrow. He can sleep next to him without needing to fuck first the day after. They have already been composing a list, and presently continue to have the luxury of adding to it.
The rustle of sheets follows more cool air against bare skin, push aside properly as Marcus settles between Flint's thighs. It is a satisfying place to be. Giving thought as to why sounds like a strenuous activity when compared to simply finding that satisfaction, expressing it in a low breath out in tandem with the squeeze to his arm, and the luxurious press of his hand about the shape of Flint's cock through the cotton.
There's a version of events where he might have felt this was in some way necessary towards staying the night, an obligation he happens to have hunger for. There's another version of events where he clutches so fiercely to the opportunity to simply sleep alongside Flint without any of this. But maybe it was in the way Flint breathed against his neck as they stood embracing or the gentle kiss to his palm or the scrape of razor against a basin edge or some other vague moment in between everything,
well, it doesn't feel as though he is stealing something for himself. Getting away with it. The future is an ink-dark room, with a warm bed and hands that know the way, and it nearly wasn't.
His hand has moved for the ties at Flint's breeches when this is said, and his answer is, first, a textured exhale. Evaluates the minor twinge he feels at the notion, so he can only say, "Yes," as he loosens the tie. And then, "Sometimes," a little wry, before landing a kiss very low on Flint's abdomen.
He makes room for him, shifting heels and knees to offer up the space Marcus requires. It's simple to do once freed of the coverlet. Is as practical as the untying of laces.
A soft pulse of fingers at Marcus' arm answers that warm kiss. And low in his belly, a keen stirring of interest that responds to the press of Marcus' palm.
"Sometimes," is a low echo of agreement. "For the best. I can't have you coming into these rooms and leaving wearing bruises every time or the company will start to resent me."
"And you," has something like a rejoinder in it. A flashed smile, crooked, showing teeth, if unseen at this moment. The firmer tug and loosening of drawstrings. "You can't have your sleeves down all summer."
Angles around his hand, fingers sliding beneath loosened fabric. Splays them, drawing fabric down where it catches at the wrist as he gathers Flint's cock into that loose grasp. It's thoughtful, that silence, punctuated by the brush of his mouth nearby, barely a kiss into the crook of Flint's hip.
"Probably," comes after a long beat. It has less to do with the question than it does with the soft pull of fabric and the direct heat of Marcus' hand.
"No one's said anything of it to me, but that means less than nothing. Gossip is more prolific than certainty."
If the healer who'd met them in that narrow Kirkwall ash and debris strewn yard had said nothing, then maybe her partner on the griffon has. And if not then, perhaps a member of Forces he'd sent searching for Marcus to begin with. Or the servants who'd been working in the makeshift infirmary talking to the girls in the laundry who have seen suspect evidence of certain indiscretions. Or, or, or.
(They have been quiet, yes, but maybe not especially subtle.)
A soft shiver, a thicker inhale. His thumb pressing against Marcus' shoulder.
This is absorbed, considered, find it doesn't start to twist in him when it might have done. Maybe the change of things or the languid mood in the dark or simply the idea of entertaining the implication is both too exhausting and inconvenient. That sound of Flint's breath, the press of his thumb, seem to say: and that's alright.
Turns his head enough to brush his mouth against the side of Flint's wrist, as if to say the same. And if there is some small thrill of satisfaction that, in spite of their echoed agreement that discretion is necessary not so long ago and in spite of the wisdom of it, he feels at the idea of something known, it feels a little like the way he does when considering the shadows of fingertip-bruises on Flint's arm or throat or hip. An impulse towards leaving a mark.
Working Flint's breeches down, until they gather high about the thighs. The contrast between cooler air and warm breath, maybe headier in the dark, maybe the same. Marcus grips Flint in a more specific curl of fingers, a gentle and encouraged squeeze before his mouth makes contact, bringing the head of Flint's cock between his lips, against the slick warmth of his tongue.
That wet heat is greeted with a soft hiss in between the teeth. For the sensation of it is stark in the unlit room, with the shape of Marcus' shoulder shifting under his fingertips like a tether line to secure himself by.
For a moment, anyway. Then, spurred on, his hand shifts to fleet blindly along the line of the other man's neck and cheek. Fingers scuffing at a temple, pushing back loose hair in a motion that is both helpful and tangling. Later, maybe, the muscle in his forearm will tighten an encourage some desired effect. But for the time behind, the weight of his hand is soft and he lets himself be comfortable in this patient, slowly wound state.
Yes, the company probably does know (or thinks they know, which amounts to the same thing). But here in a dark room with the sense of Marcus settled heavy and low between his thighs (or just here, with Marcus in his bed at all), it hardly matters. Maybe it won't for some weeks yet, either.
"That's it," a low murmur, thumb gentle at Marcus' hairline.
There is a contented sound timed with the touch of Flint's hand to his face, into his hair. Attuned to the sound of changing breath and low murmurs. Clutches at him, low in his belly.
Fingers tighter around the base of him, not checking him but holding, and Marcus lowers his head to take more into his mouth. Thrills for the familiar eroticism of that weight against his tongue, the inherently uncomfortable fullness of the task. Draws back up, wetting his lips with gathered saliva before taking him back in with a languorous slide slick warmth.
The task is simple, occupying, the sort of thing that cuts short critical thinking or reflection and whittles it right down to instinct. Pares back wants and desires to their most basic forms. The desire to give, to be praised, to taste the other man, to hold him between his jaws.
He works him with slow, deliberate strokes of movement. Breaks away, half-grasps him in hand to drag his tongue down to the base before coaxing him back in. The dirty sound of it louder for the darkness.
There is something, too, to be said for the strength of the mind's eye. The picture it conjures of Marcus there is all sharp edged in its imagined shape. He has seen what the man looks like with a cock in his mouth before—that heavy, contended quality writ broad in his features. In the dark, with only the slick sounds of his mouth, the rasp of breathing and bedclothes, it is natural to fix that image to the forefront. To think of those rough, aching noises Marcus has sometimes made between his cock and his fingers, and for the thought to hook low and hot under Marcus' touch.
"That's good, Marcus." There is a low, warm burr at the edge it. Fingers pushing back through hair, flexing across the crown of his head.
Tomorrow, he thinks. They could meet in Lowtown; there will be some hour where he might step away in the afternoon. If Marcus found the place, he could hurry to it and they could have a quick fuck in the daylight of some let room. He could watch him then; see how closely the picture in his head still trues up with reality.
The answering sound Marcus makes stands in for something like praise in return, whatever that might be. His voice, his hand, his cock. Laying back, letting him.
Marcus moves his hand off Flint's cock to smooth up across his belly, his chest, at the same time as he takes him deeper. A progressive nudging to fit him intimately in his mouth, towards his throat, as deep as he'll tolerate tonight. His fingers curl there against Flint's skin as he holds him like that for those quick few breaths before drawing back with patient slowness. Breathing, there, Flint shallow against his tongue, a slightly raspier breath out.
Lingers there, lips closing just around the crown of him, the curl of his tongue a quiet, private tease of touch that seems to feel out shape and texture and that beading hint of moisture.
The weight of the hand across his chest, the texture of fingers and palm pressing in combination with that deeper, tighter sense of Marcus' mouth— he breathes out a low, panted sound as it eases. The weight of his hand lightening, a shiver threading its way through his center in answer to the flick of tongue.
Slowly, the closing of fingers on Marcus' hair. Gets a grip on him. Rather than hitch his hip up, he makes a hitched sound. Coaxing. An encouraging press of the hand.
And in counter (or maybe in compliment), his spare hand shifting in from out of the dark. It fits across Marcus' there at his chest, covering it.
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—is not at all what Flint is thinking as he fits the back onto the stud earring, and sets it in the dish.
"I was going to try." There's a book on the side table and everything somewhere under those loose papers. But it's some Orlesian moralism doorstop, and may require more chewing than he's presently capable of.
He looks to Marcus. Meets his eye. They're stood near to one another again and the urge to sit his fingers against warm skin itches at him.
"You?"
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Not that he never does. Flint's book is even on his nightstand, in a different tower, but Marcus chose to be in this tower. Aware, too, of his own itch, of being confronted with bare skin he could touch directly instead of mediated through rumpled cloth, and when Marcus instead breaks from that nearness and moves for the bed, it's with the logic that the sooner they actually make it there—
He kneels onto it with a certain amount of proprietary confidence, snatching at a pillow to shove it across to what will be his side, the one with less light and paperwork. "But you can try, if you want," he says as he goes.
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He lingers for a moment there, absently using one hand to pull at tight finger joints of the other as Marcus rearranged pillows and bed clothes. Studying the shape of his shoulder, and the loose fall of his hair over it. But it's only a moment. In short order, Flint moves to join him—folding back the coverlet, adjusting the pillows laid on this side still. The bed is sturdy enough that it hardly complains under two men's weight moving into it. And once they are there
Flint caps the hand lamp, and the thick dark pressed into the room's margins spill in to fill it. No books tonight.
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Marcus sinks down. He probably won't sleep right away, he knows, not unless his body decides he isn't quite done with sudden rushes of fatigue, but he'd already decided it would be good enough to lay near, a kind of quiet company.
All the same. He reaches across, lets the back of his knuckles find Flint in the dark—the slope of a shoulder, by the feel of it, then turning his hand on his wrist to find a place on the other man's chest. There, warm skin, muscle and bone, hair, changing textures. He knows with a rush that he would like to put his hands all over the other man, to feel him out like this in the dark, and that it barely registers as anything like sex—but not not at all.
He doesn't follow that urge with the rush he feels. A slower entangling, one that waits.
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As he shifts down in amongst the blanket and worn thin pillows, Flint turns in answer to the exploratory flat of Marcus' palm. His own hand first finds Marcus' side, and then works up across to his chest. Creeps to clavicle and shoulder, and here is the rest of Flint following after his hand as he rolls over onto his side.
In the slate quality of the dark, it is impossible to parse Marcus in any level of detail to the eye. But he makes for familiar shapes under the hand, and a radiating heat amidst the cooler bed linens. It is easy, actually, to settle in very close against him.
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He shifts to settle in nearer, hand finding its path up Flint's chest. Throat, jaw. In the dark, Marcus traces along his cheek with his thumb until he can find the corner of Flint's mouth. A guiding point, so that he doesn't miss when he kisses him with a panted out sigh of satisfaction.
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That it doesn't do anything to settle that wound taut sense carried in his center is— inconvenient. In the same way that the flickering of desire that is primed by bare skin and the stirring associations he has with Marcus being in this room, in this bed, is inconvenient (he is tired, and the actual possibility of lumbering after a fuck seems remote at best). But there are worse things than to lay close to a person.
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The potential for frustration is fine, if it can be called that. There is enough liquor releasing itself into his blood to both have it burn brighter and eventually consume itself. There is a calculation to be made, in which Flint is tired (how tired) and he is not, and when he kisses him again, it's that touch more insistent, an answering sound from deep in his chest.
His hand has found a place on Flint's shoulder. Thumb pressing as he suggests, "Lay back."
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Flint huffs a low breath across the other man's mouth and his hand, having found its way to the bend between Marcus' shoulder and neck, curves briefly close. Fingernails pressing gently at the nape of Marcus' neck, his thumb a steady if less firm form than the one being applied to his shoulder. A slow kiss answers him, moderating.
But after, he does obey that suggestion. Shifting over with hip and shoulder, fingers slipping loosely up the line of Marcus' arm as he settles toward his back in the dark. Here is that rapt, prickling sensation under the skin yearning for the sound of the bed linens rasping about the movement of limbs and, or the small sounds the mattress makes as they reorder themselves.
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The third one lands just over that ridge of clavicle at the same time as his hand moves from shoulder to belly, the whisper of sheets tugging along the edge of Marcus' elbow, drawing back.
"Let me," he suggests, mumbled there, hand stopped.
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(He is too near to really see well, regardless of how well his eyes have or haven't adjusted.)
"Are you trying to put me back to work?" has a slanted quality to it. Somewhere in the press of the night, something bemused like a smile must be tugging at the corner of Flint's mouth. It's not a refusal, his fingers shifting up off the mattress so his knuckle might lay loose against the line of Marcus' spine.
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"No," has that same slanted quality, but sounds sure of itself, as he presses another kiss down. No, Marcus isn't demanding anything beyond what's already been suggested. His hand doesn't move much lower, but idles there, the sweep of his thumb feeling softer skin.
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Somewhere in there—the straying of his hand, Flint's fingers playing up across the curve of Marcus' shoulder. In the dark, given the muggy quality of the moonlight through the weather and narrow slot window both, he is just a smudge of something lighter in a black field. But the sense under his fingertips is quite solid. Reassuringly so.
"Then I'll let you," he tells him.
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This feels a little more like making up for lost time when Marcus was on the road as opposed to near dead or bedridden. The curl of satisfaction he feels certainly suggests itself as an answer to it. Scent and taste and feel instead of only sound, and that they lack sight doesn't feel like a lack, exactly, but a natural extension of the thing.
His hand moves, slipping down to palm over the front of Flint's breeches. Something negligent in it, as if not just in search for the shape of the other man's cock as he is interested in feeling it through the texture of soft cotton, feeling the stitch that runs there.
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I'll put my hands on you, he'd told Marcus nearly a week ago by crystal. He'd meant it. They were meant to find a room after a few drinks, and there he would have made a proper through study of every part of the other man in the lamplight—some abstract intent to see if Marcus could be made to ask for it ('Can I come?' he'd asked, and Flint has given the scraped sound of it serious thought in the interim).
So, in a sense, it should feel like wasted mental effort to lay here now in the dark with just his fingers at Marcus' shoulder, or to shift his hand to the more braced of the man's biceps where he might assert a grip, gently squeezing. To be touched, but only barely touching. But then he had thought, maybe, when they laid here in this bed tonight that he might just fit himself intimately close to Marcus and simply fall asleep in his company, and that prospect had seemed something of an even substitute for the other. He can touch him tomorrow. He can sleep next to him without needing to fuck first the day after. They have already been composing a list, and presently continue to have the luxury of adding to it.
"Do you still want me to be rough with you?"
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There's a version of events where he might have felt this was in some way necessary towards staying the night, an obligation he happens to have hunger for. There's another version of events where he clutches so fiercely to the opportunity to simply sleep alongside Flint without any of this. But maybe it was in the way Flint breathed against his neck as they stood embracing or the gentle kiss to his palm or the scrape of razor against a basin edge or some other vague moment in between everything,
well, it doesn't feel as though he is stealing something for himself. Getting away with it. The future is an ink-dark room, with a warm bed and hands that know the way, and it nearly wasn't.
His hand has moved for the ties at Flint's breeches when this is said, and his answer is, first, a textured exhale. Evaluates the minor twinge he feels at the notion, so he can only say, "Yes," as he loosens the tie. And then, "Sometimes," a little wry, before landing a kiss very low on Flint's abdomen.
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A soft pulse of fingers at Marcus' arm answers that warm kiss. And low in his belly, a keen stirring of interest that responds to the press of Marcus' palm.
"Sometimes," is a low echo of agreement. "For the best. I can't have you coming into these rooms and leaving wearing bruises every time or the company will start to resent me."
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Angles around his hand, fingers sliding beneath loosened fabric. Splays them, drawing fabric down where it catches at the wrist as he gathers Flint's cock into that loose grasp. It's thoughtful, that silence, punctuated by the brush of his mouth nearby, barely a kiss into the crook of Flint's hip.
Eventually, "Do they know?"
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"No one's said anything of it to me, but that means less than nothing. Gossip is more prolific than certainty."
If the healer who'd met them in that narrow Kirkwall ash and debris strewn yard had said nothing, then maybe her partner on the griffon has. And if not then, perhaps a member of Forces he'd sent searching for Marcus to begin with. Or the servants who'd been working in the makeshift infirmary talking to the girls in the laundry who have seen suspect evidence of certain indiscretions. Or, or, or.
(They have been quiet, yes, but maybe not especially subtle.)
A soft shiver, a thicker inhale. His thumb pressing against Marcus' shoulder.
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Turns his head enough to brush his mouth against the side of Flint's wrist, as if to say the same. And if there is some small thrill of satisfaction that, in spite of their echoed agreement that discretion is necessary not so long ago and in spite of the wisdom of it, he feels at the idea of something known, it feels a little like the way he does when considering the shadows of fingertip-bruises on Flint's arm or throat or hip. An impulse towards leaving a mark.
Working Flint's breeches down, until they gather high about the thighs. The contrast between cooler air and warm breath, maybe headier in the dark, maybe the same. Marcus grips Flint in a more specific curl of fingers, a gentle and encouraged squeeze before his mouth makes contact, bringing the head of Flint's cock between his lips, against the slick warmth of his tongue.
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For a moment, anyway. Then, spurred on, his hand shifts to fleet blindly along the line of the other man's neck and cheek. Fingers scuffing at a temple, pushing back loose hair in a motion that is both helpful and tangling. Later, maybe, the muscle in his forearm will tighten an encourage some desired effect. But for the time behind, the weight of his hand is soft and he lets himself be comfortable in this patient, slowly wound state.
Yes, the company probably does know (or thinks they know, which amounts to the same thing). But here in a dark room with the sense of Marcus settled heavy and low between his thighs (or just here, with Marcus in his bed at all), it hardly matters. Maybe it won't for some weeks yet, either.
"That's it," a low murmur, thumb gentle at Marcus' hairline.
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Fingers tighter around the base of him, not checking him but holding, and Marcus lowers his head to take more into his mouth. Thrills for the familiar eroticism of that weight against his tongue, the inherently uncomfortable fullness of the task. Draws back up, wetting his lips with gathered saliva before taking him back in with a languorous slide slick warmth.
The task is simple, occupying, the sort of thing that cuts short critical thinking or reflection and whittles it right down to instinct. Pares back wants and desires to their most basic forms. The desire to give, to be praised, to taste the other man, to hold him between his jaws.
He works him with slow, deliberate strokes of movement. Breaks away, half-grasps him in hand to drag his tongue down to the base before coaxing him back in. The dirty sound of it louder for the darkness.
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"That's good, Marcus." There is a low, warm burr at the edge it. Fingers pushing back through hair, flexing across the crown of his head.
Tomorrow, he thinks. They could meet in Lowtown; there will be some hour where he might step away in the afternoon. If Marcus found the place, he could hurry to it and they could have a quick fuck in the daylight of some let room. He could watch him then; see how closely the picture in his head still trues up with reality.
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Marcus moves his hand off Flint's cock to smooth up across his belly, his chest, at the same time as he takes him deeper. A progressive nudging to fit him intimately in his mouth, towards his throat, as deep as he'll tolerate tonight. His fingers curl there against Flint's skin as he holds him like that for those quick few breaths before drawing back with patient slowness. Breathing, there, Flint shallow against his tongue, a slightly raspier breath out.
Lingers there, lips closing just around the crown of him, the curl of his tongue a quiet, private tease of touch that seems to feel out shape and texture and that beading hint of moisture.
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Slowly, the closing of fingers on Marcus' hair. Gets a grip on him. Rather than hitch his hip up, he makes a hitched sound. Coaxing. An encouraging press of the hand.
And in counter (or maybe in compliment), his spare hand shifting in from out of the dark. It fits across Marcus' there at his chest, covering it.
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