Work Text:
Can I stand in your light just for a while?
Skull leaves for his study abroad and Lucy doesn’t know what it means for them. No more dropping in for his shifts at the coffee shop, mocha waiting, her cup plain except for her name written and underlined in his spiky script. Skull wasn’t fancy but sharp, all lines and angles. There were things she hadn’t told him yet: how she wants her hands in his hair, tugging him this way and that until she’s satisfied; how she likes the way he seems to always loom over her, like a bad day she’s tamed as her own.
What if he went off for his term in Germany meeting girls much hotter and worldly than northern Lucy Carlyle who always wore blue ( like a cartoon character , he told her), has never left Britain, and couldn’t seem to tell the bloke she was into that exact fact.
He only left a few days ago. They didn’t text often, Lucy usually stopping by his work if she felt the tug to see his face. She is there… a lot under the guise of studying, her art history notes spread across the table, the loops of her handwriting curling over and over until they all get swirled in her head.
One look at him, a break, a snapshot in time– everything smooths out. She could make sense of the tangles.
She decides on bravery, as much as she can be without him in front of her.
“Have a great first day!” she texts, no emojis, just that hanging, loud exclamation mark. She fought the urge to be sardonic, or to add lol as a comfort. She doesn't know why– it’s not like Skull thought that hard about her texts.
There’s no text back, at least not later that morning. She checks her phone over and over before painting class, setting up her easel and paint with itchy hands. They’re working on a still life, fruit tableau set up before them, all the bright colors of the world waiting for her reproduction. She has trouble making the grapes cascade like she sees them, but focusing on their off-round shapes helps her brain calm down from its worried soup.
She’s doubled up on studio classes this term so she zips to her clay handbuilding course, eager for another hour of working with her hands. After, she eats the lunch George packed for her, dinner leftovers from the night before in blue containers picked for her. It’s his way of showing her love, and it makes her smile and forget her own melodrama.
Finally her day ends with the dreaded art history. It is difficult for her to keep up and requires hours of studying each week.
Lockwood always tells her it means it’ll be rewarding when she passes. She’ll even know her craft more fully. Sure, he’s probably right (she hates admitting that) but that doesn’t ease the pain. Skull always picks at her notecards when she hauls them out. He throws his barista towel over a shoulder and sits backwards on the chair across from her.
“Don’t you know by now what a flying buttress is?”
She does, but there’s a cumulative test at the end of the last term so her pile keeps growing bigger and never gets subtracted from.
“Fuck you!” she’d say, and he’d grin at her and stay in his seat until boss Bickerstaff chases him back to the register.
She keeps her bag against her feet during class, phone in the outer pocket. Prof. Fittes is very controlling and hates seeing phones out during class– she’ll kick you out and make you sit in front of the next one. Lucy doesn’t want to risk being ostracized when she’s already struggling.
Of course, she feels it vibrate against her foot. One time, one text. It could be anyone. George, asking her to stop by Arif’s before heading home, Lockwood with his gossip fact of the week, any number of sisters asking how she’s fairing.
But hope bloomed, like red paint on a white background.
She manages to make it through the last thirty minutes of class, though she peeks before she leaves the room.
“Can I call you tonight?”
It is him.
They’ve never spoken on the phone before. It is such an innocent thing, being flustered by him wanting to talk, but her heart beats faster, thump over thump, at the thought of him missing her too. This means it isn’t Lucy– something in Skull wants her like she wants him. No cold breeze could cool the warmth in her face.
All she sent back was a simple “yes.”
*
“You’re twitchy tonight,” George says.
The boys are never observant until they are, picking into her life. Lucy imagines Norrie, back in the north at her own uni, making her own way. Would she pick up on this change?
Lucy knows the truth. Norrie would have already had the facts beat out of her, knowing exactly who Lucy’s eye was on, his first and last name, and why he was a barista instead of a shop worker. The boys were inclined to dig all the same, but not as smoothly.
“Surprised you took dinner with us tonight, Luce,” Lockwood says. “Aren’t you usually at the cafe studying on Monday nights?”
George and Lockwood share a look. Yes, Lucy is rarely present for Monday meals these days, and it seems they’ve put their heads together to talk about it while she’s been off salivating.
Tell them the truth.
They won’t judge. They’ve been flitting around their feelings for one another, and her in a relationship might finally spur some action between them, but Lucy knew they’d figure it out eventually. Didn’t need her.
They would take the piss, wondering exactly who caught the eye of the impervious Lucy. George had told her once she seemed too cold for a boyfriend. That couldn’t be true, or she wouldn’t be twitching at dinner, waiting to rush up to her attic bedroom and wait for a call from hours away.
“I’m expecting a call from a friend,” she tells them, giving details but not too many. Not until she knows what’s going on.
“You take calls with Norrie all the time, you cannot be nervous to talk to her.”
“George has a point– you talk to Norrie every day.”
“Yes, and today I’m…talking to someone else.”
Their eyes grow wide and they share another look. Lockwood grins and somehow she can tell that George’s gaze grows a little heavier. He’s looking for something.
Did he find it? She doesn’t know. He shrugs.
“We’ll get the truth out of you eventually, Lucy,” is all he says.
*
After the interrogation, she inhales dinner and takes tea upstairs. She yawns, used to caffeine this time of night, mourns her lack of chocolate coffee. Black tea is good but she’s grown used to sickly sweet– Skull always made her drink a touch too chocolatey, did before he even knew her, like he looked at her and clocked her for a sweet tooth.
What else did he see in her? Did he see her body and want, like she does when she watches him working? He often has to reach on a shelf above him, on his tippy toes even though he was tall, shirt rising until she could see a strip of skin, so pale, plump with lean muscle, bitable. The perfect place for a mark of her teeth, something to make him feel.
She’s never seen him naked. She wants him in her mouth anyway, imagining all the ways he could be, cut or uncut, smaller, average, big. She finds she doesn’t care– she only wants.
Flicking through her notecards makes time pass by a miniscule faster. He never said when he’d call, only asking if she wanted him to. Maybe something came up. Maybe he changed his mind, came face to face with a German club girl who liked the same music he did and forever matched in black. All these maybes twirling together.
Norrie would tell her to breathe. George would tell her to breathe and that she was an idiot. Lockwood would depend– on a bad day he’d tell her the worst would happen. On a normal day…he’d tell her to breathe.
She sucks in a breath. Puffs her chest out, then down into her belly. She takes a breath so big it stretches her back out, pushes against all the hunching she’s done throughout the day.
Slowly, she moves to exhale. She counts, wanting to make it past eight. Each count wooshes, her body coming back to her.
She makes it to nine, and then her phone rings.
Cradling it close to her body, Lucy plugs her headphones in and then carefully slips them in each ear. Right before it stops ringing, she answers.
“Hello?”she says strongly, false bravado coming when she needs it.
“Lucy girl,” Skulls says, voice deep and fond.
He’s never called her that before. A part of her wonders if he means it demeaningly, like she’s a little girl to him, but the rest of her likes it. It makes something purr in her. A name for her! And his voice. She’s heard him speak of course, but it sounds beautiful over the phone lines. There’s a hint of fondness, like talking to her at the end of a long day is exactly what he needed.
“How’s Germany?”
He tells her about his courses, mostly language and literature classes, how he’s been keeping up (“I thought my German was good, but I’m always writing shit down to translate later”), how he got lost trying to find the pub for dinner.
He’s rarely frazzled. Lucy wonders what he looked like, searching for the bar. Was he nervous or forever easygoing, walking in late amongst his new friends not worrying what they think of him. Knowing he can win them over anyway, knowing how a harsh word can create laughs just like a smile can.
“I painted today, spent too long trying to find the perfect color purple for grapes.”
“You and your colors.”
Even though it’s winter, her attic feels warm, stuffy. She shucks off her skirt, blushing. It’s not like Skull can see her. Her tights are mostly opaque anyway, except for where they stretch over her hips and ass, sheering out to hint at the lace brief beneath. Nothing fancy, her everyday fit. He’s seen her in it before thousands of times.
“Lu-cy,” he sing-songs. “Did you wear blue today?”
She stares at the pile of skirt she’s left in the floor, how it’s fallen in a circular shape, how it and his voice are going to hypnotize her into another woman, one who knows how to ask for what she wants, what she needs.
“Of course I did.”
“Striped sweater?”
He knows her sweaters?
“No. Plain royal blue with gold buttons.”
“Oh, that tighter one.”
This one did fit closer, not the baggy comfortability she normally chose. It was easier to tuck into the little skirt and since she was feeling thrown she wanted to look put together.
“It looks good on you,” he can say before she thinks of a comeback.
“I didn’t think you noticed things like that,” Lucy says.
“I notice lots of things about you, Lucy.”
There is something in his voice, something in the way he says her name. It makes her thighs clench and her head run wild. Since when has she become a thing worth paying attention to?
Lucy pants, then catches herself, hoping he can’t hear it over the phone. But he does.
“Are you doing something?”
Brave. Not reckless, but sometimes they look the same.
“Just thinking about you,” she answers.
He laughs. It shakes through the phone, all the German towns it has to slither through to make it to her part of London. It warms her toes to cheeks. It’s like her blood is screaming, hot now. It begs for movement. It wants her tights off, wants her to hump her pillow, rub herself, anything to take the edge off.
It wants his hand around her throat. Wants his mouth on hers.
“Lucy, can I call you every night?”
*
He does.
He calls every night, not the same time on the dot but almost. Lucy hasn’t had a mocha in weeks, instead drinking cups of sugar sweet tea, steam pouring from her cup. She keeps her clothes on until he calls, stripping every time though he’s not aware. There’s something sensuous in it, like practicing for the real thing. She starts wearing cuter underwear. She starts imagining more. What’d be like to kiss him, for his barbed tongue to do more than tease. To sit in his lap instead of listening over the phone, his head above hers talking about his day. What he might smell like. She’s been close enough to get a whiff at work– mainly sweat and coffee beans, heady though she wasn’t deep enough in her crush to memorize. She wants to smell him soap-dipped, fresh from the shower, hair dripping. And wants to smell him after hard work, a run in the London fog, sweat down his belly waiting for her.
Each night he asks about her outfit. Her piece of blue. She has a jumper for each day of the week, plus some blue bottoms and skirts, and accessories for another pop. It’s her safe space. Rarely do they get clear skies, so she becomes her own.
She tells him this. He responds:
“You’re the sun itself, Lucy.”
He says things like that, about how she’s the light, how good she must look. One night he says he “misses her terribly,” something she didn’t know a person besides Norrie could ever feel about her.
“I miss you too, I do.”
“And here I thought you only liked me for the mochas.”
“No,” she says, sure as anything. “I like you for more than that.”
*
They’re more than halfway through the term. Her painting class has moved from still life to models. Lucy likes to get lost in the human form, playing with the shapes that each individual makes. Every body is different, clothed or nude, and she does her best during class to show their intricacies with her brush. The week before were critiques of their still life, and hers didn’t go well. Painting more helps remove that weight, but not doing her best stings.
That night, she takes her shirt off while on the phone with Skull, her bra too. She leans back on her bed and listens to his voice sliding over her like a balm.
“Tell me about your painting, sweetheart,” he says.
She smiles at the pet name, heat curling at her spine. He can make her legs jelly with a single word. What will happen if he ever touches her, skin against skin, their bones and sinew as close as can be? Will she fall apart and be made anew?
“The model has brown hair, deep and rich. Lighter than yours but still dark. She was far away but her eyes were so icy blue I found the color immediately.”
“You would.”
“She was our nude model. She leaned on a chaise so we could practice figuring out curves.”
What would Lucy look like if she laid out like that? There was a mirror in front of her bed.
She shucks her leggings off, still talking to Skull about her painting, how her initial sketch went and her attack plan for next class. Then she lays on her side and looks.
She’s never seen herself like this, almost nude and posing. She is curvy like a well placed road, all switchbacks and grooves. The slope of her ass only peeks into sight, like it was hiding from view. Her breasts hung a bit towards the bed. She watches her nipples grow hard, and can almost see the goosebumps that pop on her legs and arms.
“Lucy, did I lose you?”
He startles her out of her daydream, her masturbatory looking session.
“No. You didn’t lose me. I was… I’m looking in my mirror like I’m the model. I’m the girl on the couch.”
There is silence on the phone. Wind rings the tree limbs outside her window, and a siren echoes from a few blocks down. Lucy cannot stop looking into the mirror, cannot stop from wondering what Skull’s hands would feel like right now, tracing her calves, up to her thighs, taking each ass cheek in hand and squeezing.
She hears rustling on his end now, like fabric rubbing against skin. Is he sliding into bed?
“I wish I could see you, Lucy,” he breathes out. Voice lower than she’s ever heard it.
“You do?”
“Yes.”
He wants her too, she realizes. How many times has she thought about telling him across the table at the coffee shop? All the nights she wanted to slink home with him in the dark, see what kind of dungeon he calls a bedroom.
“Wanna see you when I get back. First thing,” he pants.
Lucy sinks a hand down her panties, feeling slick already.
“I think about you all the time,” she tells him. “Used to watch you across the counter when you were working. You always seem so sure, so confident. I wondered how sure your touch would be. I’d walk home jittery from the caffeine. Had to run up to my room and rub one out before I could go to dinner and be normal.”
“You’re never normal,” he tells her. “But don’t worry. I like that about you. You’re so bright, Lucy. I stared at you too, looking down at your notes, biting your lip. You always wear those short skirts that ride up high on your thighs when you sit down. One day you bent over to pick up your bag. God, I’ve never wanted someone’s tights to rip so badly in my life. Could’ve had you right then. Wanted my mouth on your cunt in front of every customer that picked our doors to walk through.”
She circles her clit with a deft finger. All the practice she’s had since she met him coming in handy.
“Skull, are you touching yourself?”
“Yes. Are you?”
She answers with nothing but a moan, letting her circling fingers carry her closer and closer.
“Oh Lucy, sweetheart, I want you in my bed. Skirt raked up. Wanna rip your tights and bite your thighs. You know they’re perfect.”
“Perfect?” Lucy doesn’t think she’s ever sounded so breathy.
“All of you, yeah. Thighs strong enough to crush my head. I wanna lick you up, Lucy. Want your taste all over my face.”
She imagines kissing him after he eats her out, her smeared all over his mouth, sticky and salty.
“How do you like it?” he asks. “Do you circle your clit softly? Do you like more pressure? I want to watch so I can get it perfect.”
Lucy brings her hand out of her underwear and to her mouth, more saliva needed to get the kind of friction she needs. What would he think about that? Should she tell him?
“I need a lot of spit to get things done.”
He groans. “You’re going to fucking kill me.”
“Spit and circles,” she says. “Over and over. Sometimes I take time.”
“Keep going then, just like that. I want to do that for you. As long as it takes. Longer.”
She wants to confirm what she hears too.
“Are you touching yourself, Skull?”
“Since you started talking about your bloody mirror.”
“How do you like it?”
“Fuck,” he groans again. “I always wonder what your pretty blue fingernails would look like against me. Is it stupid if I think they might be like stars?”
She echoes him from earlier. “Yes, but I like it.”
Lucy moans as she keeps touching herself, breath crackling through the phone mic though she ignores that. Wishes she could be quieter, only to hear Skull’s grunts and the slick noise his hand makes, up and down his cock, over and over. She didn’t even realize he notices how she paints her nails and here she finds out he fantasizes about it. Fantasies, about her. She thought she was average, not worth thinking about, but tonight has proven her wrong. All the nights she pined, watching his skills on the espresso machine, ignoring her work and her outside life only to imagine him bending her over the pastry display case and fucking her into some sense of oblivion.
“I have so many ideas for us once you get home,” she tells him.
She’s close. Moonlight filters through the window and into her room, mixing with the overhead light. There’s something about looking out that window knowing Skull’s under the same moon, hit with that same reflective light, shadows bursting over his room. When he gets home, she’s going to see how he looks in the nighttime, light and shadow mixing, the perfect portrait for her eyes only.
“I’m close,” she tells him.
“Please come for me, Lucy. I want to hear it.”
Has she ever heard him say please before?
Sweetly, she obeys. Her body tenses up, that almost impossible squeeze she can’t believe comes from the work of her own fingers, how something so simple can bring the most intense pleasure. She lets out a rush of air, moans strangled so they won’t be too loud, remembering mid orgasm how to breathe to stretch it out. Her toes point, calves clench, body contricts as the waves hit her, stretching as she babbles, oh oh oh! falling out without any decision from her brain.
“Just like that, Lucy, just like that,” she registers in the background. “I’m going to come too.”
Lucy swears she can feel his ragged breath, the air passing over her like a breeze.
They listen to one another come down until Skull breaks the quiet.
“Can’t wait ‘till I get to see your face do that. I love seeing what’s going on behind those eyes.”
“Are you flattering me?”
“I’m telling the truth. Though I also can’t wait to see you for other reasons besides giving you an orgasm. That is high on the list though.”
“Even if I make you look through my paintings first?”
“Even then.”
Lucy laughs and it turns into a yawn. She doesn’t want to end the night, afraid whatever horny spell they’ve fallen under will break and he’ll realize he doesn’t like her. But she doesn’t imagine that softening when he calls her sweetheart– that’s there, for real. She’s heard it plenty of times tonight, so much she aches with the need to see him say it in person. He wants what’s behind her eyes; well so does she.
“Go to sleep,” he tells her. “I’ll be right here tomorrow night.”
*
“Don’t you think it’s weird a coffee shop stays open this late?”
“George, you’ll drink black tea any time of day,” Lucy says, rolling her eyes.
They’re walking through the door of the shop. Skull’s been home a day already, but because of classes and his immediate jump into work, they haven’t been able to see each other as quickly as they intended. Lucy’s belly is full of butterflies, greedy ones wanting all the leaves. She feels like they’re eating her apart. George and Lockwood are walking hand in hand, something finally happening behind her back while she spent at least an hour every evening dissecting the differences between English and German life. She’s happy, and doesn’t mind the escort to the shop. She’s missed spending time with them.
And they’ll be headed home tonight without her.
Skull’s back is turned when they first step through the door. Lucy gets to watch as he turns around, sees his face light up when he sees her. It eases all her nerves. The butterflies still. Everyone else disappears. Lucy and Skull is all she knows, stepping closer to the counter. She’s sure she looks stupid, cheeks poked out grinning wide.
He throws the towel over his shoulder and takes a cup.
“One mocha, coming up.”
“Hey, aren’t you going to take the rest of our order?” Lockwood asks.
Skull doesn’t even bother turning around, throws a hand up waving.
“I’ll get to you. Got more important things to handle first.”