heorte | when i go towards you it is with my whole life.

It's a good sound. He likes hearing Wysteria make it. He kisses her as if he'd bite each of these delicate noises out of her mouth directly. There's a slow, languorous quality to it, broken by the catch of his teeth at her lip, soothed by his mouth again.

They might do just this. He could kiss her this way and be content. He can kiss her this way and think less of what else he would do with his mouth under different circumstances.

And he can kiss her this way while his hand works methodically at her breast, while he considers her body beneath him and the splay of her thighs, and sinks his fingers into her fully. The firm sweep of his thumb is only minorly impeded, some small shift in angle to accommodate the position. And he holds there, letting her acclimate to the sensation of it while he kisses her and kisses her and kisses her, as if he couldn't bear to stop.

Slowly, impulsively, she sinks her fingers into his dark curls and makes to hold him to her. It's hardly necessary. He will kiss her, at once wanting and methodical, even if she doesn't steady him against her—

The sound she makes into his mouth is high and light, pressed out of her by the shape of his hands. It's tangled up in his kisses and the absent searching of her tongue, and it comes again a second time in answer to Ellis's hand across her breast or the pressure of his thumb.

"Ellis," is snatched between the punctuation of his mouth. Her whole body is warm. "Ellis. What you like." Her fingers press. "Please tell me."

"I hardly know," is honest, but it will disappoint her. Ellis kisses her to stave off whatever immediate rebuttal he knows she must have. He is thinking.

He is trying to think. It would be a difficult question even if they were sat across at the table, fully clothed and with no part of their bodies touching. He thinks illogically of Cathán, but none of the things that they had done together are things he would ask of her.

The sound he'd made when she'd reclaimed her grip on his hair is honest too, the easiest thing at hand to say when he breaks from her mouth.

"I like when you put your hands in my hair, when you pull," he tells her, though trailing away incomplete. There is some quiet note of strain in his voice. The wet heat of her around his fingers makes it an easy thing to touch her in some earnest, purposeful way, drawing back and driving his fingers in again. He's careful not to lift his hand completely away from her, not far enough to slide free, nor far enough to lose the firm pressure of his thumb even if the circular slide is interrupted by motion.

He is meant to be speaking.

"I like the sounds you're making. And how flushed you are," he tells her, hand lifting from her breast to trail fingers across the flush spread across her chest. "And how you move when I touch you."

Something easily mistaken for the thrust of his fingers into her, but it is a more sweeping statement than that. He likes how she leans into him when he puts a hand at her elbow or her waist, the answering squeeze of her fingers when he takes her hand. Little things, yes. But they stick in his mind without fail.

Take, for example, this nearly unconscious shift of one of her hands to cover his where it's moved up across the flushed pink skin below her collarbones. Her other fingers remain tangled in his hair, not pulling but present. This one however tightens softly over his as if to gently pin it to the warm skin where her pulse is thudding. The echo of the soft gasp she'd made in answer to that first real drive of his fingers is still humming in her chest.

That's good, because those are things that would be very difficult not to do, she doesn't say. Instead she kisses him again. It's open and warm and hitches appreciatively under the pressure of his thumb.

"Ellis—" When sighed into his mouth, it sounds like little more than approval and wanting him rather than the precursor to a half formed thought that it is. Given the present course of his hand between her legs, Wysteria is sluggish to assemble the rest. Just its outline is enough to make her face feel very hot.

"Please." The flexing angle of her hip as if she might coax some further stroke of his hand is at least partly intentional. "Would you—do that again."

"Yes."

What other answer is there to give?

She didn't have to ask, but Wysteria has a very pretty way of saying please. He gives her his fingers, answers the hitching flex of her hips as he kisses the sighs from her mouth. And though that delicate quality remains, the driving press of his fingers becomes such a steady, unwavering thing.

There's no urgency to it. Ellis is in no hurry. He works his fingers into her and his thumb bumps against her and he kisses her through it, catching each gasp with his mouth. His palm flattens against Wysteria's chest, under the that light touch of her hand over heated skin. Ellis' fingers nudge up along her collarbone, and if he doesn't feel the thudding beat of her hear beneath the palm of his hand, he feels it where his fingers graze the hollow of her throat.

"Do you like this?" Ellis asks, quietly against her mouth. It feels as if she is warm all over, color high in her cheeks and flushing hot under his hand and then lower, around his fingers and hand. It feels as if he might drown in this kind of heat.

There is an instinct to this or at least an abundance of desire masquerading as such. If Ellis' hand pressed between her legs finds a rhythm, then she's chased clumsily after it—hips hitching in tentative or reactive shapes toward the slick press of his fingers, and her knees softly falling further open against the limitations of her chemise's raised hem.

Does she like this?

The fingers in his chair flex and tighten automatically. "Yes," is all exhale, the shape of it hot under the edge of her teeth. She squeezes his hand with her own. Yes, she likes being on her back in his shadow, and how carefully he is doing as she has asked him to. And she likes the rasping edge in his quiet voice and the flat span of his palm and the faint tremor that passed through her from under his thumb.

"Yes, I do." And less structured again, 'Yes,' pressed into his open mouth with her tongue, the formation of it more moan than not. She's warm all over, and is very aware both of the steady shape of his fingers and also how much simpler their slide into her is becoming—

Something in that thought quickens her pulse and her breathing. Once noted, it's impossible to fully dismiss. Instead the awareness of it sharpens, lodging behind her ribs and growing there. Her hand on his tightens. There's something equal parts reflexive and intent in how she moves his hand back to her breast and uses the press of her fingers and the coaxing of her palm to urge him back into feeling her there.

"Good," comes twinned with capitulation to the silent begging of her fingers on his hand, urging him back to the rolling, pinching pressure at her breast.

There is no world in which he would be able to stop kissing her, but he kisses her harder, deeper for that ragged assent. He has never heard Wysteria without a small avalanche of words at her disposal, and there is some satisfaction in finding her with only one close to hand.

Only one word, and such a satisfying one at that.

"You feel so good," comes after, because Ellis too is thinking of the way she's opened to him, of the wet-slick slide of his fingers and the permissive splay of her thighs under him. All the pulling and flexing of her hands and body beckoning him in is the kind of thing that scorches, that draws out a low, quiet request of: "Keep telling me."

It's not that the pace of his hands goes any faster. But there is some desperate, burning want turning over within him. There is a flush rising up beneath the open laces of his tunic. He touches her a little more firmly, meets the instinctive, restless movement of her hips with more assurance.

It's what comes of having mapped out some sense of what Wysteria wants. It's the sense of being on more familiar ground, and that shifts the caution by degrees to make room for something more purposeful.

Edited 2021-12-22 22:35 (UTC)

Later, she will reward one of Ellis's innocuous remarks with 'Keep telling me,' and laugh at him and at herself and then maybe tease him about some secret vanity. Honestly, Ellis. Where does this habit of fishing for compliments come from?

But obviously that isn't the point. It's even less the point in the moment when she answers him first with a desperate little cry and a squeeze at his wrist where his hand moves over her breast. She can feel the tingling pressure of that hard kiss on her mouth still. And some matching sensation winding tight even in counterpoint to the way her body gives.

"Ellis, please. Kiss me again."

Is really like asking for permission, as Wysteria draws him down those scant degrees by her hand in his hair. She kisses him as fiercely as she can manage, and after demands that he linger so she can cry softly against the corner of his mouth or past his teeth, 'It's good. Please, like that,' until the cant of her breathing swells suddenly sharper.

For a close moment, a ragged breath or two or maybe for the span of time it takes for him to pull back and press back into her or for his thumb to apply the right pressure, she is very keen on just the sensation of his fingers in and on her. The way she arches under him in orgasm is almost absurdly pronounced—an involuntary thrust against both his hands, head thrown back far enough that it exposes the full line of her throat and all but buries Wysteria's face in the pillow and the wild tangle of her loose hair.

With her face so turned away, Ellis settles for kissing her throat as he works her through the sensation, all firm pressure and steady rhythm as she tightens around him. His thumb presses hard just there, not moving but present all the same as he puts his mouth over the thudding pulse at the hollow of her throat.

She is so lovely. It is a wrench to take his hand from all the wet heat of her, though Ellis does, without lifting his mouth from her throat. He hitches down the fabric of her shift in the wake of it, as he gently levers himself lower to bracket her body with his own, close the sliver of space he'd maintained all the while he was touching her.

There are things he might say. (He is thinking beautiful, stuck on that singular descriptor.) But instead, he occupies himself with his mouth at her throat and chest, giving her time to gather some opinion or request to put to him rather than prompting her for it.

She is slow to collect herself, her hands on him either slipping uselessly to the side or sliding to the nape of his neck where she might apply some fleeting and gentle and entirely unconsidered pressure in response to the heat of his mouth thrilling absently under the broader buzz humming through her. The loss of his fingers may have prompted a short aching sound, but his weight on her is so reassuringly gratifying that she shivers when Ellis applies it. There is sweat prickling under her chemise. Heat radiates from the bedclothes. The soft sounds of his mouth on her skin hang pleasantly in her ear.

With a motion that is half clumsy and half just languid, Wysteria brushes the hair from her face. That flush is still very high in her cheeks when she looks at him. If he doesn't kiss her directly soon then she will have to ask him to.

"See. Your hands are very nice."

Wysteria doesn't need to ask. When she tips her head down to deliver this compliment, Ellis shifts up and catches her mouth with his own, nearly stifling the tail-end of her statement.

The kiss itself is indulgent. Ellis' hand has relocated to her hip over the thin fabric of her shift, and his fingers flex hard there as he applies a soft, languorous kiss to her mouth now that she's re-emerged from both pillow and the riot of her own hair. That breathless quality of her tone is deeply attractive, just as the hot flush lingering across her skin.

Sleep feels like an impossibility, but Ellis has some half-framed notion of what kind of proper course might follow: he will have to roll off her, they will have to pour water from the ceramic pitcher across the room to cleanse the lingering effects of the evening. Perhaps he will tie the little ribbon of her shift into place. Perhaps they will return to bed.

It feels far off. Ellis kisses her until they must break to draw breath, and then puts his face in against her neck. Despite his best intentions, the scrape of his beard might not be so easily washed away with cool water whenever they rise from bed.

There.

That's what she'd wanted from him—the pleasant abruptness of the kiss. It's slowness and him eager behind it. She is fully amenable to melting under it, draping an arms about his shoulders and leaving it there even after the kiss has broken off. She is all loose jointed and he is lovely in his heaviness. Wysteria presses a further kiss to his temple and indolent fingers card through his dark hair.

In rare form, she feels almost no immediate urge to say much of anything. It's very sweet to simply lay under him and press close her face. His beard rasping at her neck is pleasantly coarse. But eventually, inevitably, Wysteria finds her words again.

In the middle of the loosely defined net of her arms and the tangle of her air and the soft gusts of her breathing, Wysteria noses against his hair line. "Ellis," is excruciatingly fond. She can feel it in her chest. "I know I'm a very poor student, but you must swear to me that you'll tell me how I ought to touch you."

A poor student draws a quiet chuckle from Ellis. Wysteria is many things, but she is exceptionally quick on the uptake in most every situation Ellis has seen her approach. (Archery surely the exception that proves the rule.) He'd closed his eyes somewhere in the space of that quiet between them, Wysteria's hands pulling through his hair and her body tucked beneath him, it would have been such a simple thing to drift into sleep.

But the way she says his name draws him back. His eyes are still closed when he shifts very slightly, adjusting, putting his mouth once at the hinge of her jaw before relaxing back to where he had been settled moments ago.

"Aye," is a low rumble against her throat. "After the vows are said."

It tickles, that low rumble, and the contents themselves must satisfy her for Wysteria promptly presses another little kiss to his hairline.

"Aye," is all pitched imitation.

Maybe in the not so distant future, she will dislodge him from between her legs and ask that he put her shift back to rights. But for the moment the lazy motion of her hand through his hair continues in soft, impartial turns. Here and there, a curl is caught and twisted gently between her fingertips—

"I love you," she says. "You're so very sweet to me."

The pull of her fingers in his hair draws all the tension from Ellis' body. For all that he's said, all the care he's put into containing himself, the same flush that had warmed Wysteria's skin had spread down his nape, across his chest. Laid together like this, the thudding of his heart eases, the burn and pressure of wanting cools, and he matches Wysteria in this state too.

It is so very sweet still, to hear her say such things to him. Perhaps the furrow of his brow or the slight, abortive motion of his mouth against her skin is easy for her to pick up. It is a slight twitch towards deflection, one which takes no shape only because of the warmth and peace of this moment.

"I've something for you," Ellis says instead, murmured against the high point of her throat. "It's in a velvet pouch, in my right pocket."

Which he can theoretically reach, but they're both so comfortable he's reluctant to dislodge even a hand to retrieve said parcel.

The idle motion of her hand quiets. Wysteria lowers her chin by a half degree as if to look at him, though they're too closely aligned to accomplish much in the way of it beyond briefly setting her mouth and nose against the top of his forehead—

"What sort of something?"

Though she has already raised her free hand to blindly reach after him, searching out the waist of his trousers by feel. His right, or her right?, she struggles to remember even as she slides her hand into his pocket. His right. Here is the little pouch at her fingertips.

Wysteria closes her hand around it, but doesn't withdraw either.

"A gift," Ellis answers.

He has considered by now that it's necessary to dislodge himself from how comfortably he's sprawled over her. The thought culminates in a slight shift downwards, his face still tucked in against her collarbone. It draws Wysteria's hand slightly from his pocket, but it doesn't draw her hand from it entirely.

"If you'd rather something else after you've seen it, we can see about procuring something else."

The brief pressure of his weight prompts an absent shifting, a gentle and almost assuredly unconscious squeeze of her knees.

"I like all the things you've given me." That's true. Even the things she's had little practical use for, like that forearm guard for archery. It had been very prettily made.

With her mouth still close at the to of Ellis's forehead, Wysteria draws free the little velvet pouch. To hold it up where she can see it requires untangling her fingers from his hair so she might turn the small satchel about in her fingers and examine it's shape just there above the crown of his curls. She presses with her thumbs to feel out the shape of its contents.

A small sigh at the loss of her fingers. Ellis' mouth moves at her collarbone, almost a kiss.

The contents are easily discerned. Ellis had not tried to disguise it, though he'd envisioned passing the piece of jewelry to her in a very different manner. But Wysteria's exploration will map out a tell-tale circle, delicate even through the velvet. A ring, as promised.

Tipping it from the pouch reveals it to be a simple thing: a woven gold band, polished and gleaming, meant for her finger.

Ellis' hands shift up, one hand at her shoulder, the other catching a lock of her hair to twist gently around his finger as Wysteria makes her examination.

She's careful about slipping the ring from the little satchel, laying the latter on his shoulder because it's conveniently placed to act as a table top to her. Between her thumb and forefinger of her other hand, Wysteria holds the slim band up for inspection at an angle where the light from the nearby lamp might play on it.

"Oh good," is her nearly immediate assessment, quite genuinely put. "I was worried you might look for something more ostentatious or with sharp little edges or a raised stone, and then I would have had to beg you to find me something to be simply worn about. But I can put this on my finger and wear it under my gloves."

And out into the field or wherever she might like. Something more delicate would have to be taken off for her work, or hung on a chain about her neck or—

She tips her face to look at him. Her knees clamp gently about him once more.

"Would you care to put it on my finger?"

What a relief, to have chosen something to her taste.

Ellis kisses her first. It's not anything like an answer, but if he levering himself upward there is simply no reason not to kiss Wysteria again once the angle permits.

"Yes," he tells her, punctuated by a second, light-pecked kiss. "I do."

It's a specific choice of words. Yes, he does want to put this ring on her finger. Even though it means shifting upright, ceding the warm drape of their bodies. The little satchel is thoroughly ignored in the process. Ellis braces his hands against the mattress, kisses her a third time before sitting upright between her knees.

It is, absurdly, very sweet to be kissed so by him. Sweet enough that she almost regrets asking him to stay up from her for; sweet enough that she does get an elbow under herself so she might reflexively chase his mouth just a little—

"Oh, wait."

Wysteria thrusts the ring into his hand and then collapses backward again. Lying there, she fetches the edges of her chemise judiciously up over the spill of her breasts and deftly does up the little ribbon. In short order, she has restored herself to the absolute bare minimum of respectability (so long as one ignores the drape of her thighs and the press of her knees about him). Only then does Wysteria lever herself back up onto her elbow and present her hand to him.

"I don't want have to tell Maud I was in an indelicate situation should she ask how I came about the ring."

"No, of course not," has some humor in it, but the truth is: Ellis is in agreement. More or less.

Having narrowly avoided dropping the ring, and now having possession of her hand, Ellis might simply put the ring on and then return to her in whatever position she might wish.

But instead, he turns her hand in his own so that he might kiss first the inside of her wrist, then her palm, then her fingers, each in turn.

"I've no pretty vows," he says, faintly apologetic. They have both read enough shared volumes to know that such gestures are usually accompanied by flowery oration. But Ellis has never been given to it, and so must settle for: "But I swear myself to you, for all of my days and after."

And there is all the ceremony of it, for Ellis slips the ring onto her finger, then bends to kiss there over the cool metal where it sits on her hand.

It's a very sweetly put thing. It would be sweetly put even if his clothes weren't rumpled and his mouth weren't flush full from kissing her, if she were in all her clothes and her hair weren't riotously disarranged about her shoulders. She might have cried then under those circumstances. Even now, she is distantly aware of the prickle of tears at the backs of her eyes. Yet here there is just the faintest air of absurdity to the whole thing—how she has pushed his curls in every direction, and her knees about him, and Ellis claiming to have no pretty words while saying the kindest was new she can imagine.

It makes her laugh, sun bright, as he kisses the ring where it encircles her finger.

"Those will do," she says, turning her hand just a little to tug gently at the edge of his beard. They're fine words.

Ellis lets that tug carry him downwards. Not flush against her as he was, but bracketing her shoulders with his elbow and her face with his hands, holding himself above her so he might kiss her again.

"I love you," he tells her, a little like a reminder but more for the pleasure of saying the thing aloud again. "I'll undress and see to the fire, and then we can go to bed."

Go to bed as if they have not occupied said bed for some stretch of time now.

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