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when i go towards you it is with my whole life.
 | You came to the side of the bed and sat staring at me. Then you kissed me—I felt hot wax on my forehead. I wanted it to leave a mark: that’s how I knew I loved you. Because I wanted to be burned, stamped, to have something in the end— I drew the gown over my head; a red flush covered my face and shoulders. It will run its course, the course of fire, setting a cold coin on the forehead, between the eyes. You lay beside me; your hand moved over my face as though you had felt it also- you must have known, then, how I wanted you. We will always know that, you and I. The proof will be my body. — louise glück |
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"'Oh, but I simply must set this fire in the basement—'"
It seems required to give him some small measure of grief, though her own smile is curving and her hand is gentle and fond at his cheek. And then gentle still at the soft lay of his still damp tunic collar.
"Tell me again, then. How much you think of me. And when you say something I especially like, I will let you know."
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But there's nothing to be done about the ventilation in her haunted house at this exact moment. What's meant to occupy his mind now is Wysteria's request, which exists alongside the burning awareness of her fingers at the collar of his tunic.
Ellis draws in a deep breath, fingers drumming lightly over her back as he pecks a brief kiss to her mouth. It would be nice to be able to say something sweeping and poetic. But Ellis doesn't have anything other than honesty, resolved carefully into words because she'd asked it of him.
"I think of you at all hours of the day," he tells her, humor turning solemn. "More so when you are away, or I am away, and I have to consider how long it will be until I see you again."
There is no reason to complain of distraction. Ellis has reconciled this particular desirous ache to a point where it exists neatly alongside whatever he might be occupied with, whether it's his work in the training yard or a mission taking him far afield.
In a murmur, punctuated with a softly laid kiss to the corner of her mouth, he admits, "It always seems to me that it will be too long. Even if it's only that I'll wake in the morning and be kept too busy to see you until the evening."
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Does she think of Ellis so often? No, she thinks. But there is also no one more in the world who she loves to talk to, who she wishes to tell everything all the time. And since when has she ever wished to share anything?
Up close and listening to him, she lapses into a rounded, attentive silence. She studies his warmth and the fine pattern of the wrinkles and the weather touched shape of his skin and how his neck rumbles under her hand as he speaks. He really is beautiful. And when he quiets—
'There. I liked that very much, thank you,' she doesn't say, though originally it's what she'd meant to. To be coy and arch and funny. Instead, she kisses him.
It's an abrupt all at once thing. Firm like a kind of affirmation ought to be, drawing him (or herself) close by his collar until that last sliver of space between them—that thing which had seemed so substantial—evaporates.
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Ellis had prepared for a question. It had felt inevitable, Wysteria pressing him for something further with that edge of satisfaction in her voice and curving across her face. He'd always been pleased to see that look on her face, and maybe even more so when it's directed at him.
But instead, all that focus resolves at a speed Ellis shouldn't really be surprised by. She's so close, all at once. That carefully maintained pocket of space vanishes. He makes a soft sound into her mouth, hand lifting from her back to the nape of her neck, thumb at her cheek. For a long moment, he's more preoccupied with how neatly she fits in against him than her mouth or her hand curling in at his collar. A brief tremor of movement hitches through his body, his hand tightening on hers as he thinks and then reconsiders rolling her over into the clover.
"Wysteria," is said so quietly, blurred between one kiss and the next. If there was meant to be more, a question or a request, it's set aside in favor of kissing her. There's some end point. Ellis is aware of the inevitable moment when he'll need to draw back from her. But not yet.
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With the shape of that heavy sense of affection lodged high in her chest and expanding there, her hand at his collar briefly untangles. It finds its way to curl around the back of his neck, fingers pressing into dark hair. It's not a hurried thing, but neither is it gentle—the tenor having altered from touching to holding as a means to keep him close. That way when his kiss ends, she can easily demand another with a soft plaintive sound and a faint squeeze of the fingers.
(She can feel her heart beating because of how it jumps against the broad scope of Ellis's chest and against his palm where its curved almost in mirror image to her own.)
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In this moment, he considers: what if this all he was ever meant to do with his body? What if he was made to lay here with Wysteria's body curved in against him and kiss her every time she tightened her hands in his hair?
He cannot go far from her. (He knew that already.) Here, he can draw back far enough to draw a ragged breath against her mouth, then settle back at the murmured sound of protest. Where else would he go?
What a thing it is, to spend so long numb before being reminded that it was possible to feel such warmth, to thaw by degrees for months and months before arriving here. His mouth is so soft against hers, pliant and biddable, as his grip on her hand tightens and loosens by turns as he recalls the link there.
But when he says, "Wysteria," a second time, it's a quiet stall against the sound he can already hear from her, her coaxing grasp on him already urging him back. He has the sense of balancing at the top of a precipice, and good sense says to draw back, but it is impossible to disturb the arrangement of their bodies all at once.
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Breathing warm and rounded near to his mouth, she is very aware of the heat of him under her hands and in the sturdy shape of his body against which she'd so eagerly pressed herself. The closeness is a sweet thing, born out of so much affection that she hardly considers the semantics of it. Only that she wants very much to be there, and that there is something lovely in the low murmuring shape of his voice in that place.
"Yes?" Her hand flexes in his hair. It's nearly an involuntary thing, though isn't quite.
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His fingers stroke gently down her neck instead, as Ellis draws just slightly further back. Just enough to see, not enough to disturb her hands, more re-establish the space between them.
"I'll kiss you as long as you like," is not a hard thing to offer up. "But I think—I'd like to go slowly, beyond that."
This is perhaps too direct, but Ellis doesn't know how to talk around his intentions satisfactorily.
"And I need a minute. To breathe."
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"How pleasing to be dangerous in so many respects," she declares to the sky, and is still some measure of self-satisfied as she tips her face to look at him and say— "We may be as measured as you like, Ellis. I couldn't bear to exhaust you."
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"You," he says, softly against her mouth and painfully sincere. "You are perfect."
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"But I love to hear you say it, so won't argue further. Now," she says, playing at serious in his arms. She gives his hair the smallest tug. "Kiss me just once more and try your best to be a little selfish about it. Then I will release you. Those are my terms."
put a bow on this y/n
But coaxed forward by the sweet, appealing lilt of her voice and the gentle tug at his hair, Ellis lets go of her hand. He cups her face, reclaiming the scant space set between them so he can kiss her again.
In terms of being a last kiss, it's likely not very helpful. Ellis kisses her deeply, fingers sliding into Wysteria's hair, tips her head slightly back though it's not strictly necessary. Laid side by side, their difference in height isn't important. It's only as close to selfish as Ellis can get. There's the sense of sinking into her, of wanting so badly to get closer despite already being drawn flush together. The kiss spins out, on and on and on, until Ellis nips very lightly at her lower lip, and draws back enough to speak.
"There," is breathed out, his hands gentling and drifting to the nape of her neck. "Did that fulfill our bargain?
Yyy
But the way he tilts her chin up and this, how he absorbs the space they'd remade and fills it completely, is. There is a thrill in it that catches her breath. That becomes the most pleasant ache. The tangle of her fingers in his hair becomes a pressing thing, and between them where her other hand is at liberty she finds some unexamined grip on him. His side. The fabric of his damp tunic is easily clutched there.
The brief catch of teeth elicits the softest sound from her as he draws back. For a moment, her face remains tilted up—something heated and heavy through the whole of her—and her initial noise of protest is a formless, thoughtless thing. And brief, as a moment later she recalls her terms enough to regret them.
"Oh." Her hands on him come grudgingly undone. "Yes. I suppose it ought to."
And then, in a burst of lively self inflicted agony: "—Oh, how terrible! You must promise to never listen to me again, Ellis. And certainly never to make any other agreement with me!"
She thumps him in the shoulder for good measure before managing to both extricate herself and collapse dramatically onto her back in the clover.
(Which is, really, the best version of a last kiss she could have possibly contrived.)
coolcool yell your wishes at me for a new thing into discord and i will grant them
Instead, Ellis lands on his back, head returned to the saddlebag, and reminds himself of all the reasons he'd said it would be the last to balance out how very badly he had wanted to continue on. Across the crushed bed of clover, his hand steals into hers.
And, true to form, there's a stretch of quiet in answer. Ellis' grin remains even as the deep rise and fall of his chest evens out. Eventually, he kisses her knuckles.
"Come along," is so, so fond. Ellis is levering himself up already, drawing her by the hand with him. "We should start our ride back, before it gets dark and cold."
Before they are tempted to stay. The pleasure of being sun-warmed and slightly damp will go with the sun, and Ellis wants to hold onto it, ride back with the sun on their faces.
It's a good day. He wants it fixed in his mind as such.