It's not quite like going from drunk to sober in a moment, but it's somewhere on that spectrum. There, the free and heady desire to do anything to meet the harsh edge of the thing and tumble over it, and then he has, and he is here, still, impaled and panting and open. The prickle of Flint's attention all at once sharper as he reorients his focus back to the other man.
And it feels good, Flint's cock in him, the grasp of hands on his thighs, the slight readjustment that sees them locked in closer. Feels good, too, to see want written so plainly there on the other man's face, as cracked open as he feels. It smooths that feeling that had been like a rise of hackles.
Where do you want me? and Marcus reaches down, curling his hand around Flint's arm.
"Come here," he says, still that edge of breathless. Hands pulling and ushering the other man to bend down back to him, and he lifts his thighs to accommodate. Does not demand he bow all the way into a kiss, catching him close with a hand to his chest, another up to his face, fingers splayed against jaw, thumb sweeping over mouth.
It feels good just to touch again, palm skimming muscle, pectoral, ribs, the other a gentle bracket at his face that doesn't seem like it will let him turn away. "Like this, here. Come in me. Fuck me."
In that slow rearrangement, dredged not fully down but close, his hands migrate. One for the mattress, planting in the tucked coverlet; the other moving from the top of Marcus' thigh to grasp at the tender skin and taut muscle below the back of his knee in absent reinforcement of the elevation of his leg. Touching to touch, some absent parallel in the flex of his grip to the hands that wander over him.
And that answer— Caught against the heel of Marcus' hand, he breathes out a long and aching sigh. Brow furrowing and eyes blinking briefly shut, throat thick as he pants hot against skin. Good. That's the answer he'd wanted (though maybe any answer would have been good; he could have come across Marcus' belly and that mingling of fluids would have satisfied too).
The muscle stretched across Flint's shoulder flinches as his face grows faintly heavy in Marcus' hand. Then, another hitch. This, from the hip, and it seems to remind him of how good the friction is—the fucking part of fuck me—, because then his weight shifts. Rocking forward onto his braced arm and levering the grip at the back of Marcus's thigh, he draws back. Gives one, slow stroke into him that becomes two before the dragging momentum of his own hunger catches at to him, and he moves to resume fucking Marcus in earnest.
He holds him there as Flint breathes through that long sigh, thumb impressing affection against the corner of his mouth. His own focus is sharper, renewed clarity. In the muggy haze of golden lamplight and a late hour, most shades are reduced to tea-stained gold and bronze, eyes dark with it, shadows sinking into dips and valleys. It would be nice to do this with sunlight in the window. Harsh light of day to study by. Shades of green and blue in those moments of eye contact.
But Marcus does like this, these close hours that feel like they belong to him, and Flint within them. Too accustomed, right now, to be totally silent, a soft scrape to breath out as the other man's weight settles, the strain of the hand at the back of his knee. A quieter sound out of him at that first stroke back in. The good ache of it without that overwound feeling of his own need.
Marcus' hand moves from Flint's face to his neck, a grip there that doesn't seek to interfere with that crucial rocking forward. The other comes up to curl around the wrist set against the covelet.
"It's good," is murmured, more whisper than voice. "It's good, that's good. Show me."
Some minutes ago, he'd felt more in control of this. Sturdy touch, patiently exploring the plane of Marcus' back and shoulder, fucking so slowly into him that it had ached. Eager, but not desperate. Hungry, but not starving for it. But Marcus wants him. And here, that light wrapping shape of fingers and the murmur of praise that goes straight to his cock, and he finds himself clinging by fingernails. Stripped down and anxious to be satisfied, fucking with a reckless kind of urgency.
Show me, Marcus tells him, and he groans out a low, carrying note in answer. Lets something give in his neck and shoulders to hang his head and lean softly into the shape of the thumb and palm.
In that hot, close space with the coverlet twisting under his hand and Marcus' encouragement warm against the skin, he's good for only a handful of full rough strokes down into all that waiting heat before his grip slips. Some line in him bowing, he comes with a catch of breath. A sharper grunt. Spills hot and sudden and sweet into him, pressing close for the insensible ringing duration.
With a shuddering exhale, he sags back. The angle of Marcus' leg is permitted to ease, and Flint slips nearly fully free of him as he slackens.
It feels a little like having some scrap of control wrested back. Not that it had been wrestled from him, as established. Given freely, and now between his hands again. Even here, laying bent doubled, held in place and the issue of his own orgasm cooling on his skin, from here Marcus can watch Flint unravel, murmuring, hands on him, inviting it with all parts of him. Something he is doing as well as being done to.
A warm, internal shiver follows the moment when Flint goes still and slow. Quiet, leg released, Marcus shifts enough on the bed until Flint and he are free of one another, a flicker of something in his expression that is both appreciative and amused at that specific feeling, delightfully dirty. That lowered legs moves crossways to let him sit up, leaning into Flint's space, hands out to catch his shoulders, jaw.
Doesn't kiss his mouth, first, going sideways to press it against his cheek, a warm nuzzle-like scrap of contact, as if waiting patiently on the edges for Flint to join him in the aftermath rather than immediately demand for more.
The soft flinch for their parting is only distantly marked. For here are Marcus' hands, and the warm scuff of his unshaven cheek, and the shape of his own short breath bouncing off skin back to him. Somewhere, Flint lays his hands at Marcus' side, his waist. The top of his thigh, his knee.
As the blurred shape of this bends back together and the drags of urgency melt off him, it becomes simple to turn his face the necessary degree to scuff his lips at the corner of Marcus's mouth. To breathe some heavier, fuller exhale out against warm skin. By the time he kisses Marcus, he's reordered himself enough to recall how to be slow and patient. The sound he makes into his mouth is only some low appreciative murmur, and there is so demanding scrape of teeth.
It isn't strange for them to come together gently in the after, even if it does seem to leave off in short order. Some return to form, nipping remarks and the slow dismantling of the thing built together until they occupy distinct spaces once again. This is thought of in some abstraction and with no particular conclusion as Marcus presses a kiss back, leaning into hands, his own suring up around Flint's shoulder, the other tucked under jaw.
Knows a little edge of greed, though. Awfully ambitious, given his own capacities in this moment, that he will likely sleep as soon as settled, but still there, present a little in the way he opens the kiss up just enough to taste his tongue past the other man's lips, before relenting.
That hand at Flint's shoulder slips down to chest as he drops his head, chin nudging the other freckled shoulder, mouthing a kiss there. Feels a little like prodding at a bruise, this, and equally satisfying.
A half turn of his face to follow has him breathing heavily across Marcus' hairline, mouth incidental at his temple. The warm, wet shape of the kiss at his shoulder is sting and balm both; he imagines he must taste like sweat, and smoke from the oily lantern (or from this proximity to Marcus, whose skin carries that scent on it despite having been divested of every stitch of fabric).
No, these are ordinary impulses. To kiss, and touch. To linger close for some short measure until the sweat and come begins to stick unpleasantly instead of just being rewardingly grimy. Give it a minute. Give it two, and the desire to loiter in this space will come unstuck. But for that duration, the wandering of hands stroking idle lines along Marcus' thighs; and the warm, steadying draw of breath; and, in less than a minute, Flint nosing at Marcus' cheek with a low rumble of request until he lifts his face the degree necessary to kiss him mouth again so that he might return that lazy taste of tongue past teeth.
"Where is your cigarette case?" a low spoken question, thickly murmured, when he eventually breaks back.
Lazy, Marcus lifts his head, answering that kiss with a small, contented sound. A hand wandering back up and around Flint's shoulder, sketching his thumb over a line of muscle. Part of him imagining pressing the other man back down to the bed, restarting all of this again, albeit slower and lazier.
The other part of him harbouring a more realistic perspective, and stops him from leaning in to chase Flint back down before the other man speaks.
Hm, and he looks back to the fold of his things on the chair. It does feel a mile away, those few steps from the mattress. "There," he answers. Moves a leg with the intent to go and retrieve it unless stopped, motions all slow and lazy.
He is stopped—the hand at his thigh catching closed. Near him, chasing the tender skin below Marcus' ear, Flint makes a low noise to protest the thing. Some grumbled assurance like, I'll have it, and he unfolds his own leg. Drawing his hands sluggishly away, he twists over with a working of muscle in shoulder and side.
It takes less actual physical effort to clamber across and out of the bed than it really seems like it ought to. Then he is on his feet. Sweat drying skin prickles in the oily lamplight. The night is dark—a purposeful decision to pick some span of time when the moon would be sliced thin for the work Marcus and the others had pursued—, and there is no moonlight to augment the room through the slash narrow windows.
Regardless, a cursory feeling up of Marcus's folded clothes reveals the hard edges of the case. Flint doesn't have to rifle far in the half dark to find the right pocket to raid before he makes to return to the bed.
Marcus moves once they finally break contact. Not far, just a sliding up a little on the covelet, stretching worked muscles in the same motion before settling, back finding the headboard in low slouch. His focus is more on the other man, anyway, considering the sight of him, standing casually bare in warm light, handling Marcus' clothing.
Will find himself watched when he makes to return. Inside, it's half full of cigarettes wrapped in brown leaf, with one mostly finished and stashed away for later dissection. The metal is an orangey tint, brighter in the lamplight, with its scratched in flame shape on the lid that he is sure he's seen Flint glance at skeptically at least once before.
This time, he offers an answer to unasked question, "It was a gift," lest he be accused of such obvious self-styling, never mind that he let it replace the ordinary tin one he'd had prior to it.
It's only a few strides back to the bed even when they're meandering ones. Once he arrives at it, he sets one knee up onto the mattress with enough weight applied there that the foot remaining on the thick rug underfoot is pretense.
(The eyes on him are to be expected. It might be disappointing were he to have turned and discovered Marcus' attention elsewhere. Anyway, it's only fair—he's looking at Marcus.)
His focus wanders down to Flint's hands, but also that stretch of thigh, which he remembers clutching not so many minutes ago, really, and the myriad of other little sense memories attached. Without the same sex-stupid fog clouding his judgment and senses, it's a different thing to look at Flint now, even if the man is in much the same positioning.
Rare, too. They'd likely be half-dressed by now, or making motions towards it, little room for lingering appreciation. Marcus narrows perception back to his hands, lazily anticipatory.
"It was left for me on a Satinalia without a note."
Flint's huff of a breath out as his attention dips to extracting a cigarette is like a laugh. This fucking place. These fucking people.
"Objectively preferable to the kitchen knife left on my doorstep," he observes, flipping the case shut with a soft nip of metal.
Then the case is set aside, a reflecting muggy orange rectangle on the mussed coverlet, and with the chosen cigarette tucked casually behind the ear, Flint clambers easily back into the bed. He sits beside Marcus, but with his back to the rest of the room rather than settling in alongside at the headboard. A bent leg, the line of hip and and thigh and knee incidental against the other man's side.
(It's generally easier to observe a thing from this direction rather than from beside it. To say nothing of the fact that he's tired, and if he lays down beside Marcus in bed made warm from their exertions then he will pass out before he has had the opportunity to
What, exactly? Make use of these minutes where he might study Marcus in his bed? Stupid.)
Leaning forward with the cigarette, he makes a grunt of a request for a light.
Minor adjustments follow Flint settling, sitting up a little further out of slouch to match. Conforming to arrangement, nearness, knee leaning to thigh. His hand falls to gently rest on the inner of Flint's knee, palm teasing over the hair that prickles over that patch of skin before resting.
With his other hand, raising it, he summons a small twist of flame between the bracket of thumb and middle finger, holding it in place for Flint to make use of. No sharp little studies to see if Flint flinches or hesitates, a broader kind of observation that is more appreciative than trying to find something out.
Only once the end of the cigarette catches and embers properly—
"I wasn't spared," he says, leaning back. "I received a bowl from the kitchens, and returned it on the finding. The culprit tried to break into my quarters to retrieve it some days after," because he's an idiot, says a fine flicker to his expression, "and talked only just fast enough to save himself."
He'll take an anonymous cigarette case over almost doing grievous harm to a man in a state of indignant paranoia.
"Do you think we'll still like each other come Firstfall?" And he turns his hand to accept a cigarette being passed to him.
(Surely if he were liable to flinch from the spark, he would have leaned over to the lantern instead. Or, at the very least, would have steeled himself for the brittle tang crackling in the air before all but summoning it.)
Flint's pulls on the cigarette are shallow and briefly held, the perfunctory type to coax the leaf and paper into burning made during some hum of acknowledgement for an idiot. He takes only one proper drag on the cigarette before moving to surrender it into Marcus' possession, turning his face in some easy direction so as to exhale smoke out through the nostrils.
What a question. It pinches at the corner of his eye. Tickles somewhere low in his belly.
"Do we like each other now?" he asks, tilting his face back. It has a scrape of humor to it, cool as it is.
Hm, around the end of the cigarette, drawing in smoke to linger in his lungs. Tips his chin up to breathe it out again over their heads.
"We could try," has an answering scrape of humour. "See how we like it."
Marcus turns his hand to offer the cigarette back, eye contact ticked down to watching the burning end of the object. They are, anyway, sat here like this, with a propensity for finding each other again. Maybe if Satinalia were tomorrow, Marcus would identify two things he knows about Flint and combine them into a gift too.
He still has his hand at his knee, thumb idling against the edge of bone.
He might refuse the cigarette—for all that he'd been quick to fetch the case, it isn't so much his habit; he'd just wanted the sour taste of it in Marcus' mouth in case he kissed him again, and the tang of the smoke on his bare skin should they lie next to one another—or refuse this, but to do both seems unwise. Unfair. Purposefully obtuse.
So he takes the cigarette, saying, "That sounds like the argument I might make if I were trying to avoid having to wake up and secrete myself out of this room in a few hours."
An idle pull on the cigarette comes a flexing of his brow accompanied by the slip of lamplit gold-green eye contact. He isn't saying Marcus Rowntree's present motivations are suspect, however—
When the cigarette is traded back it comes with a faint gesture, Keep it.
This gets a wry twist at the mouth. Cigarette kept.
"And overstay my welcome?"
Pronounced with a silent and dry Never at the end of the rhetoric. In a few hours, he might regret not pushing the point. In a few hours, he might rely on being a warm and tempting (or too pathetic) of a prospect for bed-sharing for Flint to be very motivated to turn him out.
But there is something in these shared entanglements that feels reckless for how little he thinks about whatever comes next, save for that ceaseless need for more of it. Marcus takes from the cigarette in sedate pulls, hand lifting from Flint's knee to fidget, magically, with dispersing the fall of ash and ember into nothing.
His mmm of assent has the shade of a laugh in it. About fifty of them, give or take.
Free of the obligation to manage the cigarette, his hand moves absently to smooth across his knee at the place where Marcus's hand had set. Then shifts to some wrinkle in the coverlet nearby, pinching and scuffing it idly between the fingers. A vague, mundane echo of the dispersal of ash and ember, an unconscious rearranging of the environment.
"I have my suspicions we might find we dislike one another given the opportunity for closer examination."
In the smoky lamplight, watching Marcus' face and hands while sat beside him in his bare skin, it's possible that it sounds slightly funny. Less serious. It helps the impression that Flint punctuates it with a direct look and some crooked slant to his mouth amidst auburn whiskers.
It's slightly funny, less serious, but it's obligatory that there should be a small twinge beneath the surface as Marcus turns his focus back to the other man. Meeting direct look, measuring crooked slant.
He takes another pull of smoke, something heavier in his settling back against the headboard as he releases it again.
"Do you?" is frank prompt. It, too, is accompanied by something a little wry, and also the return of his spare hand, conforming palm to calf. "Maybe you're assuming you've escaped scrutiny this long."
The not unamused tightening flex in Flint's face suggests, yes, that's true. This is in fact the point from which he's operating. Then again—
A faint tilt of the head and a turning gesture of the hand up from the coverlet asks, Hasn't he?
Nevermind that Marcus' hand is pleasantly warm on him, or that he is beginning to know the tang of the particular leaf the man smokes and the scent of it lingering in the air here satisfies something low behind the ribs. That's not the point.
It's true that he could not put together a full page of concrete facts about the other man. Flint has effectively deterred with the kinds of vague answers that Marcus might normally set his claws into without further distraction, and further distraction has nearly always been present. But there is still some sense of knowing. The abstract broad shapes of a person, conveyed in what they do and say. That only so many details could alter it.
Not that Marcus is inclined to make this case, corner of his mouth twitching at wry, silent answer. He can feel confident in it on his own.
Satisfied with having established some of the truth in this fact, his hand returns to that wrinkle in the coverlet at which he might thoughtlessly worry between thumb and middle finger.
The slant of his mouth pitches fractionally deeper, but somehow less like a joke despite the glint of easy humor in his eye. Well.
"That if I answered that question honestly, you would decide to slip away now instead of staying a few hours. Which I think we've both decided we would prefer."
There's a place and time where it's possible that Marcus might reach all the way across to trap Flint's hand where it toys with bed covers, pull it into his own possession. Convey something of what he is feeling in the press and flex of thumb and fingers, or try to detect the same from the other man. That place and time may have resembled this one.
He keeps his hand, instead, where it is, an arcing rub of thumb against muscle. Scoffs, slightly, at the idea that anything short of direct order might compel Marcus out of this spot and into his armor, all the way back to his room which will smell chill and stale and so much like the Gallows.
![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
no subject
And it feels good, Flint's cock in him, the grasp of hands on his thighs, the slight readjustment that sees them locked in closer. Feels good, too, to see want written so plainly there on the other man's face, as cracked open as he feels. It smooths that feeling that had been like a rise of hackles.
Where do you want me? and Marcus reaches down, curling his hand around Flint's arm.
"Come here," he says, still that edge of breathless. Hands pulling and ushering the other man to bend down back to him, and he lifts his thighs to accommodate. Does not demand he bow all the way into a kiss, catching him close with a hand to his chest, another up to his face, fingers splayed against jaw, thumb sweeping over mouth.
It feels good just to touch again, palm skimming muscle, pectoral, ribs, the other a gentle bracket at his face that doesn't seem like it will let him turn away. "Like this, here. Come in me. Fuck me."
no subject
And that answer— Caught against the heel of Marcus' hand, he breathes out a long and aching sigh. Brow furrowing and eyes blinking briefly shut, throat thick as he pants hot against skin. Good. That's the answer he'd wanted (though maybe any answer would have been good; he could have come across Marcus' belly and that mingling of fluids would have satisfied too).
The muscle stretched across Flint's shoulder flinches as his face grows faintly heavy in Marcus' hand. Then, another hitch. This, from the hip, and it seems to remind him of how good the friction is—the fucking part of fuck me—, because then his weight shifts. Rocking forward onto his braced arm and levering the grip at the back of Marcus's thigh, he draws back. Gives one, slow stroke into him that becomes two before the dragging momentum of his own hunger catches at to him, and he moves to resume fucking Marcus in earnest.
no subject
But Marcus does like this, these close hours that feel like they belong to him, and Flint within them. Too accustomed, right now, to be totally silent, a soft scrape to breath out as the other man's weight settles, the strain of the hand at the back of his knee. A quieter sound out of him at that first stroke back in. The good ache of it without that overwound feeling of his own need.
Marcus' hand moves from Flint's face to his neck, a grip there that doesn't seek to interfere with that crucial rocking forward. The other comes up to curl around the wrist set against the covelet.
"It's good," is murmured, more whisper than voice. "It's good, that's good. Show me."
no subject
Show me, Marcus tells him, and he groans out a low, carrying note in answer. Lets something give in his neck and shoulders to hang his head and lean softly into the shape of the thumb and palm.
In that hot, close space with the coverlet twisting under his hand and Marcus' encouragement warm against the skin, he's good for only a handful of full rough strokes down into all that waiting heat before his grip slips. Some line in him bowing, he comes with a catch of breath. A sharper grunt. Spills hot and sudden and sweet into him, pressing close for the insensible ringing duration.
With a shuddering exhale, he sags back. The angle of Marcus' leg is permitted to ease, and Flint slips nearly fully free of him as he slackens.
no subject
A warm, internal shiver follows the moment when Flint goes still and slow. Quiet, leg released, Marcus shifts enough on the bed until Flint and he are free of one another, a flicker of something in his expression that is both appreciative and amused at that specific feeling, delightfully dirty. That lowered legs moves crossways to let him sit up, leaning into Flint's space, hands out to catch his shoulders, jaw.
Doesn't kiss his mouth, first, going sideways to press it against his cheek, a warm nuzzle-like scrap of contact, as if waiting patiently on the edges for Flint to join him in the aftermath rather than immediately demand for more.
no subject
As the blurred shape of this bends back together and the drags of urgency melt off him, it becomes simple to turn his face the necessary degree to scuff his lips at the corner of Marcus's mouth. To breathe some heavier, fuller exhale out against warm skin. By the time he kisses Marcus, he's reordered himself enough to recall how to be slow and patient. The sound he makes into his mouth is only some low appreciative murmur, and there is so demanding scrape of teeth.
no subject
Knows a little edge of greed, though. Awfully ambitious, given his own capacities in this moment, that he will likely sleep as soon as settled, but still there, present a little in the way he opens the kiss up just enough to taste his tongue past the other man's lips, before relenting.
That hand at Flint's shoulder slips down to chest as he drops his head, chin nudging the other freckled shoulder, mouthing a kiss there. Feels a little like prodding at a bruise, this, and equally satisfying.
me, seeing my 800 typos: womp
No, these are ordinary impulses. To kiss, and touch. To linger close for some short measure until the sweat and come begins to stick unpleasantly instead of just being rewardingly grimy. Give it a minute. Give it two, and the desire to loiter in this space will come unstuck. But for that duration, the wandering of hands stroking idle lines along Marcus' thighs; and the warm, steadying draw of breath; and, in less than a minute, Flint nosing at Marcus' cheek with a low rumble of request until he lifts his face the degree necessary to kiss him mouth again so that he might return that lazy taste of tongue past teeth.
"Where is your cigarette case?" a low spoken question, thickly murmured, when he eventually breaks back.
we'll fix it in post
The other part of him harbouring a more realistic perspective, and stops him from leaning in to chase Flint back down before the other man speaks.
Hm, and he looks back to the fold of his things on the chair. It does feel a mile away, those few steps from the mattress. "There," he answers. Moves a leg with the intent to go and retrieve it unless stopped, motions all slow and lazy.
no subject
It takes less actual physical effort to clamber across and out of the bed than it really seems like it ought to. Then he is on his feet. Sweat drying skin prickles in the oily lamplight. The night is dark—a purposeful decision to pick some span of time when the moon would be sliced thin for the work Marcus and the others had pursued—, and there is no moonlight to augment the room through the slash narrow windows.
Regardless, a cursory feeling up of Marcus's folded clothes reveals the hard edges of the case. Flint doesn't have to rifle far in the half dark to find the right pocket to raid before he makes to return to the bed.
no subject
Will find himself watched when he makes to return. Inside, it's half full of cigarettes wrapped in brown leaf, with one mostly finished and stashed away for later dissection. The metal is an orangey tint, brighter in the lamplight, with its scratched in flame shape on the lid that he is sure he's seen Flint glance at skeptically at least once before.
This time, he offers an answer to unasked question, "It was a gift," lest he be accused of such obvious self-styling, never mind that he let it replace the ordinary tin one he'd had prior to it.
no subject
(The eyes on him are to be expected. It might be disappointing were he to have turned and discovered Marcus' attention elsewhere. Anyway, it's only fair—he's looking at Marcus.)
The case pops open with a soft click of metal.
"From who?"
no subject
His focus wanders down to Flint's hands, but also that stretch of thigh, which he remembers clutching not so many minutes ago, really, and the myriad of other little sense memories attached. Without the same sex-stupid fog clouding his judgment and senses, it's a different thing to look at Flint now, even if the man is in much the same positioning.
Rare, too. They'd likely be half-dressed by now, or making motions towards it, little room for lingering appreciation. Marcus narrows perception back to his hands, lazily anticipatory.
"It was left for me on a Satinalia without a note."
no subject
"Objectively preferable to the kitchen knife left on my doorstep," he observes, flipping the case shut with a soft nip of metal.
Then the case is set aside, a reflecting muggy orange rectangle on the mussed coverlet, and with the chosen cigarette tucked casually behind the ear, Flint clambers easily back into the bed. He sits beside Marcus, but with his back to the rest of the room rather than settling in alongside at the headboard. A bent leg, the line of hip and and thigh and knee incidental against the other man's side.
(It's generally easier to observe a thing from this direction rather than from beside it. To say nothing of the fact that he's tired, and if he lays down beside Marcus in bed made warm from their exertions then he will pass out before he has had the opportunity to
What, exactly? Make use of these minutes where he might study Marcus in his bed? Stupid.)
Leaning forward with the cigarette, he makes a grunt of a request for a light.
no subject
With his other hand, raising it, he summons a small twist of flame between the bracket of thumb and middle finger, holding it in place for Flint to make use of. No sharp little studies to see if Flint flinches or hesitates, a broader kind of observation that is more appreciative than trying to find something out.
Only once the end of the cigarette catches and embers properly—
"I wasn't spared," he says, leaning back. "I received a bowl from the kitchens, and returned it on the finding. The culprit tried to break into my quarters to retrieve it some days after," because he's an idiot, says a fine flicker to his expression, "and talked only just fast enough to save himself."
He'll take an anonymous cigarette case over almost doing grievous harm to a man in a state of indignant paranoia.
"Do you think we'll still like each other come Firstfall?" And he turns his hand to accept a cigarette being passed to him.
no subject
Flint's pulls on the cigarette are shallow and briefly held, the perfunctory type to coax the leaf and paper into burning made during some hum of acknowledgement for an idiot. He takes only one proper drag on the cigarette before moving to surrender it into Marcus' possession, turning his face in some easy direction so as to exhale smoke out through the nostrils.
What a question. It pinches at the corner of his eye. Tickles somewhere low in his belly.
"Do we like each other now?" he asks, tilting his face back. It has a scrape of humor to it, cool as it is.
no subject
"We could try," has an answering scrape of humour. "See how we like it."
Marcus turns his hand to offer the cigarette back, eye contact ticked down to watching the burning end of the object. They are, anyway, sat here like this, with a propensity for finding each other again. Maybe if Satinalia were tomorrow, Marcus would identify two things he knows about Flint and combine them into a gift too.
He still has his hand at his knee, thumb idling against the edge of bone.
no subject
So he takes the cigarette, saying, "That sounds like the argument I might make if I were trying to avoid having to wake up and secrete myself out of this room in a few hours."
An idle pull on the cigarette comes a flexing of his brow accompanied by the slip of lamplit gold-green eye contact. He isn't saying Marcus Rowntree's present motivations are suspect, however—
When the cigarette is traded back it comes with a faint gesture, Keep it.
no subject
"And overstay my welcome?"
Pronounced with a silent and dry Never at the end of the rhetoric. In a few hours, he might regret not pushing the point. In a few hours, he might rely on being a warm and tempting (or too pathetic) of a prospect for bed-sharing for Flint to be very motivated to turn him out.
But there is something in these shared entanglements that feels reckless for how little he thinks about whatever comes next, save for that ceaseless need for more of it. Marcus takes from the cigarette in sedate pulls, hand lifting from Flint's knee to fidget, magically, with dispersing the fall of ash and ember into nothing.
"I suppose you've nosy neighbours."
no subject
Free of the obligation to manage the cigarette, his hand moves absently to smooth across his knee at the place where Marcus's hand had set. Then shifts to some wrinkle in the coverlet nearby, pinching and scuffing it idly between the fingers. A vague, mundane echo of the dispersal of ash and ember, an unconscious rearranging of the environment.
"I have my suspicions we might find we dislike one another given the opportunity for closer examination."
In the smoky lamplight, watching Marcus' face and hands while sat beside him in his bare skin, it's possible that it sounds slightly funny. Less serious. It helps the impression that Flint punctuates it with a direct look and some crooked slant to his mouth amidst auburn whiskers.
no subject
He takes another pull of smoke, something heavier in his settling back against the headboard as he releases it again.
"Do you?" is frank prompt. It, too, is accompanied by something a little wry, and also the return of his spare hand, conforming palm to calf. "Maybe you're assuming you've escaped scrutiny this long."
no subject
A faint tilt of the head and a turning gesture of the hand up from the coverlet asks, Hasn't he?
Nevermind that Marcus' hand is pleasantly warm on him, or that he is beginning to know the tang of the particular leaf the man smokes and the scent of it lingering in the air here satisfies something low behind the ribs. That's not the point.
no subject
Not that Marcus is inclined to make this case, corner of his mouth twitching at wry, silent answer. He can feel confident in it on his own.
"What else do your suspicions say?"
no subject
The slant of his mouth pitches fractionally deeper, but somehow less like a joke despite the glint of easy humor in his eye. Well.
"That if I answered that question honestly, you would decide to slip away now instead of staying a few hours. Which I think we've both decided we would prefer."
no subject
He keeps his hand, instead, where it is, an arcing rub of thumb against muscle. Scoffs, slightly, at the idea that anything short of direct order might compel Marcus out of this spot and into his armor, all the way back to his room which will smell chill and stale and so much like the Gallows.
"But now I'm curious," he says, after a beat.
(no subject)
(no subject)
(no subject)
(no subject)
(no subject)
(no subject)
(no subject)
(no subject)
(no subject)
(no subject)
(no subject)
(no subject)
(no subject)
(no subject)
(no subject)
(no subject)
(no subject)
(no subject)