Work Text:
I want to share your mouthful
I want to do all the things your lungs do so well
I'm gonna bed into you like a cat beds into a bean bag
(Mm, mm, mm-mm-mm-mm-mm)
Turn you inside out and lick you like a crisp packet
--- alt-J
“Is this okay?”
There’s something about 3am. When she was little, her mother called it “the witching hour”, the time of night when the veil between worlds is thinnest, and spirits cross over to wreak havoc. Ghosts and demons are more her partner’s domain, yet she can’t deny there is something in the air. She feels it prickle on her skin, like static before a storm.
Maybe she’s been possessed. Why else would she be here, in his bedroom, slowly undressing while he watches in stunned silence?
“Is this okay?” she asks again, slipping out of her skirt. He is sitting up in bed, shirtless, the duvet pooled around his waist. He nods slowly, and she can hear his breath hitch slightly.
Stripped down to her bra and panties, she loves the way he stares at her; reverent – like she is something holy. The intensity of his gaze is dizzying, her own breathing shallow. But he doesn’t move, perhaps afraid that if he tries to touch her the spell will be broken, and the moment will be lost forever. She peels off her bra, steps out of her panties.
They’ve been kissing, lately. It started innocently enough, in a hospital hallway, like so many of their milestones, and she wonders what it says about them that their most important moments seem to happen in liminal spaces. That first kiss was sweet, ambiguous, a tender moment between two people who care a lot for each other.
There has always been this thing between them.
The second kiss was a different beast, born of grief and fear and desperation. Holding him as he wept, trying to keep all his pieces together, and him, clinging to her like a lifebuoy. Their lips came together like crashing waves, and he tasted like the sea.
Tonight, there is no grief or ambiguity. She awoke on his couch, wrapped in an old blanket, smelling of him, and the orange glow of the streetlight outside lit a path to his bedroom door, left ajar. The clock on the wall struck 3. She let the spirits guide her.
Now, she joins him in his bed, climbing on top of him like it’s something she’s done a thousand times before. She kisses him and he kisses back and there is something urgent and hungry about the way his tongue moves against hers.
Heat blooms everywhere he touches. His fingertips brush against every other freckle, mapping the constellations on her skin. A rush of memories floods her brain, a supercut of every time he touched her shoulder or pressed his hand to the small of her back – she burned then, too, but now there is nothing between them, no layers of clothing to act as an insulator. Electricity flows through them, uninterrupted. Together, they form a closed circuit.
“Are you sure?” he gasps, his breath hot against her ear. His voice is a paradox, rough and hungry, soft and hesitant. “Are you sure this is what you want?”
It’s something she has spent the last seven years asking herself. There has always been this thing between them; some unspoken force crackling in the air in every room they’ve inhabited, since the first day they met. Whatever it was at first - attraction, chemistry, a biological anomaly - it has only grown stronger with each passing year, galvanized by the breadth of their shared experience.
Who else in the world could begin to know the expanse of her mind? Who else but him could begin to understand the things she has seen?
“I want this,” she says, the words an incantation in the still air.
Together, they fall forward into the great unknown, the same way they always have, hands clasped and rapid breaths in unison. The contours of his body are at once familiar and entirely alien; she never realized how incomplete she was every moment she spent without him inside her. For once in their partnership, he lets her lead, matching her rhythm while he touches her everywhere, all hands and lips and teeth. He pants her name, and his breath on her skin is intoxicating. Thoughts unspool in her head as she nears the point of no return, and they come undone, together, always together. She buries her face in his neck, biting down as the aftershock surges through her.
When it’s over, she rolls off him and they lay side by side as their breathing slows and their heartrates return to normal. After a moment, he turns to her, a smile on his face that says, “did we really just do that?” and suddenly they are both laughing like they did in a little cemetery in Oregon, soaked to the bone, seven years prior. The unthinkable, inevitable thing has happened, and they are the same as they always were.
*
She wakes before him, untangles herself from his arms and sheets, and dresses in his en suite. The witching hour has been and gone, and in the cold light of morning she feels the fingers of doubt picking at the memory. She watches herself dress in his mirror and tries to decide if she looks any different; if his touch has irrevocably marked her in some visible way.
As she goes to leave, she pauses to watch his chest rise and fall, the ghost of a smile playing on his lips. She remembers the scorch of his fingertips on her skin, smiling to herself, then, like a phantom, she’s gone.