evokethestarsabove | Inbox (Rubilykskoye)

Death often gets a person off the hook where their schedule is concerned.

Obligations and arrangements fall by the wayside, left to those left standing to sift through for what is and is not still something that needs dealing with — if Gwenaëlle had remained dead then ‘whether or not Alasdair Mac an Rìgh had recently got laid’ would not have strictly speaking been something that needed handling in direct relation to tidying the space that she had previously occupied. He would still have needed to deal with it. Lestat, to whom it almost certainly would have fallen to deal with her belongings and the like, might very well have been involved in solving that problem.

Just, for different reasons.

Since she is alive, though, and getting herself back into the groove of a schedule that had fallen apart for the better part of two months, she reaches out first by mental link—

I assume we’re still on for later.

—which he might not have.

She meets him at the door of her cottage.

He responded affirmatively, if briefly; it's hard to tell if the brevity is because he's still uncomfortable with casual telepathy or he was just taken off guard at the news she's returned. Regardless, he turns up when she expects him. Punctual.

Alasdair has had a rough month and it shows, for all he does his best to downplay it. He's neat, certainly, his clothes slightly upgraded with some basic tailoring and a new piece or two. Still, that doesn't offset the evidence that he's slept poorly for the past several weeks. The fatigue lurks around his eyes. Even so, the flicker of a smile when he sees her is genuine behind his guarded affect.

"Am I allowed to say that it is good to see you?" His tone is soft enough that it is clearly a joke, even if he's watching her expression carefully to see how she takes it.

With her head tilted, she takes in the tailoring — the exhaustion, too, the slope of his shoulders. Even the close way he watches her; the sense that he is testing the edges of this arrangement between them. (She thinks of him ‘alone’ in his room in the boarding house, and it’s hard to justify pushing back, even if it crosses her mind to do.)

I’d hate to have already become a chore—

No. She settles on, “It’s very good to be seen,” which doesn’t feel unambiguously true but will do, anyway, when all she wants is to make this feel … ordinary. Lighter. As if she can will away the weight of it, lingering in the shadows.

The house smells warmly of some musky oil, soaked through the air by heated water, as she leads him through it into her bedroom — where she clearly has something particular in mind, a chair that must be the one missing from the dining table they’d walked past in the clear space nearest the window, where the light falls. That scent, heavy in the air. What looks like an entire shaving kit and several clean, folded towels set out on her own vanity,

“Sit,” she says. “I have something in mind. You’ll like it.”

Talking about the time she was gone, or certainly about the false reality that preceded it, seems to be off the table. Which is fair enough, given the boundaries she'd set, but it still feels odd. He works to set the strangeness aside as they move through the house, familiar after as many visits as he's now made.

What she's set up in her room, though, genuinely surprises him. "Oh," he says, considering. "Is it ... under the circumstances, I feel as if I should have been the one who planned something special." He gives the impression, rather, of a person who didn't know this particular friendship was the exchanging Christmas presents sort until presented with a parcel. Not displeased, exactly, but certainly backfooted.

Her close-mouthed smile has a certain slyness to it, repeating her instruction silently this time by giving him a push toward the chair as she allows the bedroom door to close behind them. (And— as much as she’s fond of an outdoor tryst or something impulsive somewhere it shouldn’t happen, her shoulders relax with the turn of the doorlatch. It closes, and this is a private thing apart from the world, and she can make that work.)

“Don’t worry,” she says, more lightly, “I fully intend to benefit.”

Another nudge, until he’s sitting, and she stands between his knees, as pleased with herself as a cat into the cream. “I’m going to tidy your beard up,” she informs him. “Not shave it off, don’t worry — just… trust me,” warmly, coaxing. “A little. Make yourself comfortable,” leaning past him, pressed against his body in the process, to pick up one of the towels, “and I’m going to be right. Back.”

Her demeanor gets him to smile a bit as he goes to sit, and the smile warms a bit as she leans over his shoulder. Once she moves away, he sheds the vest he's been wearing in lieu of the doublet he's more used to, giving her access to remove the cravat or open his shirt if necessary.

He doesn't relax as visibly as she does once they're alone, but there is something that releases in his shoulders just the same. A middle place between his public demeanor and how she'd seen him in his private space. Things don't have to be strange between them, he seems to decide, if they both put their mind to it.

As she moves, he comments, "Someone else mentioned I looked a bit rough recently," a generous paraphrase of how it had actually been put, "so I suppose it's for the best I put myself in your hands."

Gwenaëlle suppresses her instant dislike of even so banal a mention that other people exist and talk to him, which is a stupid thing to object to — a thing she would not object to if this were a more intimate tryst than it is, and that irritates her only in her preference to pretend for as long as they’re in one another’s company that nothing outside of it even exists. Least of all other people who might have a stake in how either of them look.

For a split second, wrapping the towel around the handle of the kettle she’d been boiling above the hearth and lifting it, she considers putting it back down and telling him she’s changed her mind and what if he just bends her over the end of her bed and then leaves.

Only a moment, though. Don’t be fucking crazy, she tells herself, don’t fuck this up.

“Great,” she says, only a little too brightly, too taut, returning with the kettle and pouring it over the towels left in the tray. “Do that.”

… she can salvage this, she can make that sexy again, she’s great at that. She makes herself smile, lowers her shoulders from where they had tightened up toward her ears, and gives the wet towels a moment before lifting one very carefully by its corner — wringing it as it cools just enough, hot but not scalding, and coming to his lap. She lowers herself gently across his thighs, some of the confidence she’d worn when he arrived returning, and tilts his head back with her free hand,

“I had to guess what scent you might like,” she says, wrapping the hot towel around his face so his nose is still free to breathe, “but I like this one.”

He's too attentive to miss the fact that he's misstepped, even if he isn't entirely sure how. It hadn't felt like an especially personal remark to make, not within shouting distance of presumptuous. And yet.

Alasdair's instinct is, as ever, to try to fix what's been marred. But she's so quick to move past it, to move on, that trying to back up to the part where he'd irritated her feels counterproductive. Maybe, if there's an opportunity later, he can ask what he did that she disliked so he can avoid it in the future. He'll keep the question in his pocket.

For now, though, he lets her place the towel on his face. He takes a deep breath, both steadying and letting him get a good dose of the scent she's chosen for him. He can't easily speak without disturbing the towel, but he hums positively, to suggest she has in fact picked something he likes.

They are so close to one another, now, that he can feel the way tension bleeds out of her as she turns her attention more fully to the part of this she had planned out, imagined in her head— she smooths the towel until she’s sure it’s going to stay in place without her careful hands. She slides her fingertips down his throat to unfasten his cravat — in no great rush, languid now that he’s where she wanted him to be, pulling it free and folding it neatly aside. Her thumb slips into the dip of his clavicle, fingers splaying beneath the fabric of his shirt,

which is definitely not how this would be proceeding were she a barber and not a tart with a taste for bearded men.

(A clean shave is, in her opinion, easier; she’d made a point of learning how to trim a beard just as well when Leslie had made a point of refusing to get rid of it.)

“I’ll change the towel when it cools,” she says, unfastening his shirt, lazy, following the line down to his trousers and opening those, too, “it’ll stay there for a few minutes. This isn’t the part you’ll need to be still for, but try not to let it slip off, please,”

doesn’t actually count as warning him before she slides her fingers around his dick.

He swears quietly but feelingly when she does. If he'd been expecting it, it seems he wasn't expecting it just then, it following unfastening his trousers quickly enough he hadn't quite caught up. He does, however, manage not to dislodge the towel.

He evens out his voice, for logistics or otherwise, when he murmured, "I thought it was my face you'd immediately had plans for." It could not in any way be misconstrued as a complaint, given the dip in tone. He'd missed her, he found, and at least in this context that was acceptable to express.

“Mmmhmm,” a hummed answer that vibrates against the side of his throat, “this is positive reinforcement, chéri.”

The pet name is playful enough that maybe he won’t notice the way she avoids using his name, habitually; certainly if she simply avoids providing him enough opportunities to recognise that she does, as a general rule, prefer using people’s names. Maybe more immediately distracting is the unhurried touch of her hand, travelling lower to map the topography of his balls as if she’s fondly refamiliarizing herself with his landscape, hands as soft as she hopes for him soon not to be.

She’s wearing the same perfumed oil as soaks into his skin with the heated towel. It probably isn’t strictly within the bounds she’d set out herself, determining that he should firmly associate her and the press of her body against him with the practical business of maintaining his beard, and surely, if it were put to her as directly as that, she would insist that isn’t at all what she’s doing, not that, specifically—

though it is.

Whatever her intentions, it's an arresting opening gambit. She can safely assume she has his full attention. Alasdair has the fleeting thought that he'd not understood why Keir was so fond of blindfolds before. While he doubts they are likely to become a favorite — in his heart, he's too fond of control — he can glimpse the appeal this way.

He feels as if he should be doing something more to the purpose with his hands, but he also doesn't want to give the mistaken impression he's trying to hinder her. She's pressed to his body closely enough that it's not as if she can't feel it when she makes his breath hitch. Instead, the arm of the chair gets the force of his grip for the present.

He works to hold onto enough focus not to dislodge the towel. It can't be said that he is not a man to take instruction, after all. The scent makes it feel like she's suddenly everywhere, and it's a bit overwhelming, though not unpleasant.

Her touches stay teasingly light — enough to start the engine but not more than that — as she goes through a second towel, freshly hot on his skin when the first begins to cool. Her hands are warm and wet, a little slick from the oil, and she touches him everywhere she can reach; slides her fingers inside his shirt, over his waist, into the dip of his hipbone and back down, lower. Constant, warm, close—

she hums, satisfied, before she lifts herself out of his lap and takes the towel away.

“Now I will need you to hold still,” she informs him, catlike in her own pleasure, conscious of the slickness between her thighs and how distracting she finds the line of his throat, extended that way. The sudden absence of her is cooling, and she doesn’t bother covering him again — she does have plans for the rest of this afternoon that his now-unattended erection is very important to.

It’s just particular, the way she goes from constant, coaxing petting to standing across the room, arranging the shaving cream. When she comes back to him, too, she’s careful only to touch him as much as is necessary for the business of tidying his beard — sharpening the line of it at his jaw and throat, beneath his cheekbones. Trimming the excess and keeping it consistent, not that he had been untidy, before, just…

The difference is subtle but distinct. She has every intention of sending a well-groomed man out of her bedroom, later. If it suits her to make him ache for her first while she hums over the straight razor she wields with a degree of worrying confidence, well.

He lets out a little breath when she starts on his beard: subtle, so as not to move more than necessary. It's a mixed but (on balance) not unpleasant sensation to have her change tasks this way, giving him a moment to catch his breath. He seldom has anyone else attend to his beard, even at home, though not never. Never, admittedly, in this particular setting, but there's something somehow more intimate about the feel of the instruments so near his throat.

Alasdair knows better than to make such an observation aloud, but at least for himself, he notices that he trusts her. He isn't entirely sure when that happened, but it is information that he can save for later and examine at his leisure.

For now, he lets himself relax some as she works. Not entirely, given her opening gambit, but the overall sensation is surprisingly pleasant. Anticipation without impatience.

Her knees rest against and between his as she stands in front of him, working carefully and deliberately — bent close enough to feel how warm she is, the way these scents still surround him. She hums while she works, taking her time, patient with her own process; it’s a gentler, smoother shave than he’s given himself in the past, his beard saturated with warm, scented water even before she’d massaged an oil into his face, giving easily where Gwenaëlle wants it to. The way that he’s worn it himself is the guide she uses—

that, but better. Tidier, smoother, sharper. After she sets the blade aside, dried neatly, she bends her knee to rest it on the chair in between his thighs, her leg resting against his prick, so she can brace herself a little better when she cleans him up with cold water and witch hazel, her hands gentle.

Combing his hair back from his face with her fingers, she leans to kiss him, lingering—

“So,” playfully serious, close to his mouth, “I don’t know what you had in mind while you’re here…”

She gets a rich laugh from him at that. "Well, if a deliberate shave could satisfy the curse requirements, I think a lot of us might have more free time on our hands." He raises a hand to cup her cheek, his thumb idly tracing the sweep of it. "But since you ask what I envisioned," yes, "I think it's been intriguing to feel how you are when you are extremely careful with me. I wonder if you might enjoy me being slightly less careful with you in turn."

It's a genuine offer: They've been together enough times for her to know he's a man who can take a "no," or even a "not right now" with good grace. On the other hand, she can feel in his body and hear in his voice the way she's affected him already. She asked what he wants, and he's told her with a frankness he feels she's earned.

Just because he tends to "careful" doesn't mean its his only available approach. He feels he might remind her.

Envisioned makes her think of—

well, she had wondered if he had fantasies about her. No need to think too deeply about when she’d last wondered that, just: “I might enjoy that very much,” she says, arch, lowering herself back into his lap with no real intention of lingering there. Her bed is just feet away, but to be immediately closer to him is inarguably, irresistibly appealing.

“I’ve put the blade down,” she says, leaning into the way his thumb shifts across her skin, “I don’t need you to be careful with me.”

He does consider whether he can just pick her up and stand to take them to the bed. Briefly, at least. He thinks it's plausible, but also he thinks that the small chance he fumbles it isn't worth the risk when they're so pleasantly tangled up together as they are. Instead, he leans up to kiss her, catching her by the back of the neck as he does. It might seem like an abrupt acceleration, if you disregarded the fact she'd been winding him up, directly and indirectly, for quite a while.

She's sitting on top of him, but he is bigger than she is — a fact that is not in play until, abruptly, it feels like it might become so imminently. He's likely going to move them soon, but holding her here for a moment has its appeal as well.

He now, inevitably, smells like the oils she's used, a haze of it surrounding the two of them between his skin and hers.

Sliding her thumbs down the side of his throat as he kisses her, Gwenaëlle shifts closer when he gets a grip on her — not that there’s much closer for her to get, the flimsy nightgown that she’s been burning through logs to keep the house warm enough for tangling around her thighs and presenting not much in the way of impediment to him. Thin fabric, wet from her hands, between her body and him, exposed; her hair is loose and curling over his hand at her neck, and it feels—

familiar, comfortable. They’d found a rhythm, almost, despite how fucking messy the past months have been. The very specific thing between the two of them works and works well and if she just doesn’t think about anything else…

(Anyone else.)

“Compelling,” she murmurs, between kisses.

"I wondered if you might think so," was low. "It feels as if you do."

The hand that's not at her neck slides along her hip, bunching the thin fabric as he traces her body's curve. "While it's extraordinarily compelling to think of having you right here," he adds, almost casual except for the undeniable heat of it, "I do think the bed will give us more options. Ultimately."

The way he shifts against her is, possibly, something of a mixed message with regard to moving from their present configuration.

The temptation to object is a playful one — how can he feel that with his hands in her hair, before the one curves over her hip in a way that doesn’t not feel possessive — except that the way she seeks friction against his thigh is not exactly subtle, and he could tell her so if he wanted to.

“Options,” she repeats, sliding her thumb against the edge of his jaw where his beard is still damp, imagining what he might have in mind to do less gently. It’s very difficult to convince herself to move (other than the way she’s already moving, hips restless), but compelling to contemplate luxuriating in the urgency she’s raised in him in her own bed. Behind a closed door, in her own house, where she can predict who is around and expect privacy and fucking relax.

And relax, while fucking.

This is what moves her, finally, out of his lap — backing up to her bed and letting herself fall when her knees hit it, pushing herself further up with her heel dug into the bedding. Her nightgown rides up her thighs in the process and she does nothing about it, so there’s not anything subtle about the fact she’s wearing nothing underneath it, either.

He doesn't leave her long on her own, almost flowing from the chair to follow her to the bed. (It's easy to imagine how he might move in water, when he's relaxed. No motion wasted, as ever, but there's a smoother through line instead of a series of economical moves.)

The change in perspective is a compelling one before he even touches her, Gwenaëlle underneath him instead of him having to look slightly up at her in his lap. The way he hasn't touched her yet has to be deliberate, as close as he is. He meets her eyes. "Is this where you want to be?" is both a check in and an open door for requests. If she gets the sense from the way he asks that it might be the last question for a while... well, there is a certain tone to it.

Tempting to roll over, especially with the mood he seems to be in, but there’s a very real appeal to seeing him — remembering where she is and who she’s with, indulge it completely before she closes the door behind him again, later.

“I’m good here,” she says, sliding her hands up his torso, beneath his arms to the back of his shoulders, knees spreading to make space for him between them. He’s holding off, but she’s impatient, now, too — inevitably. If there’s one thing she’s not, really, it’s patient. “Here is—” with a breathier quality, huge eyed and anticipatory, “—very good.”

He doesn't make her wait longer than that; he is patient, generally, but she's been ramping him up since he arrived. He would argue, if anyone brought it up, that he has been plenty patient already. (No one seems likely to bring it up.)

As promised, he isn't gentle with her when he brings them together, the effect she's had on him — and, just maybe, their weeks apart — effecting him in a way he doesn't try to hide. This, after all, is explicitly sanctioned. He's allowed to want her behind closed doors, and he does. It's fine as long as he can leave it here.

The way he kisses her is like he's stealing something.

Gwenaëlle presses a fervent cuss into his skin, hitching her knee over his hip as he slides home; her nails press into his shoulderblades, holding him tight to her for a moment, fingers clutching at him as she adjusts to accommodate. He’s close and warm and she can feel him as she

couldn’t, before, watching and wanting.

Meeting him in that kiss she bites at his lip, bracing a heel into the bed beneath them and pushing into the way he moves, urgency making her sloppy, wet mouth and wide thighs. If either of them last long she’ll be astonished—

“Bruise me,” she says, half into his mouth. “I’m not fragile.”

Inbox (Rubilykskoye)

end of december.

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