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

At least a half dozen. Not that she's been counting, of course.

"Very good," she says. It has a prim sort of quality as if they have together decided to mark something off on a checklist. One can almost hear the scrape of Wysteria's pen crossing it off in one long scratch.

Her thumbs press once more very absently at their postings. In some sense, they're very close indeed. Outrageously so, really. But the distance involved in not kissing him is sufficient to allow for a brisk assessment of their respective states. For a brief and obviously calculating instance, Wysteria takes advantage of it to do just that. To measure Ellis's hands idle at her thighs, and the pull of his breathing, and how warm he is, and the grey in his hair and the quality of his attention on her. It's the sort look usually reserved for mechanical schematics or skewering items retained from the field inside her traveling kit so they might be transported safely home again. Very likely it is the same look Wysteria had only hours ago been devoting to a fade touched wolf's corpse. Fascinated, and thinking, and very intent.

"Then here is what I believe we ought to do," she says at last, quite resolved on the matter. "I would like to kiss you, say, six more times. And I would like you to make them whatever sort of kisses appeals the most to you. Once that's been accomplished, I'm rather of the opinion that you ought to put your hand under my hems and touch me like you've done before."

She is ignoring the heat on the back of her neck. Anyway, she is flush already so what difference do it make? Still, a speedy clarification and even swifter ammendment—

"Inside me, I mean. Unless the angles involved would be inconvenient. But I have some faith it can be accomplished."

There, see. A list.

Under such keen study, Ellis has the sense that if given any time at all, Wysteria will parse out how to take him apart in a matter of moments. She has developed such a talent for seeing through him already. He might have been laid bare in due time if she'd been left to her own scrutiny, regardless of whether or not he stepped out from behind that screen unclothed.

"The angles are right for it," Ellis tells her seriously, as if this is something that had been in serious doubt.

His palms flatten over her thighs, fingers tightening by degrees. Just enough to leave an impression; there is no need to encourage her further forward when she is well placed for what she's proposing. His grip flexes there, slides upward by degrees to take hold of her hips, then further, circling her waist and leaning in towards her.

"Will you kiss me after?" he asks, mouth against her collarbone. "When I've given you six more kisses, and put my hand under your hems?"

"I will," has the tenor of an oath, quite serious and more or less in parallel with Ellis's own apparent sense of gravity. His hands are very square and his mouth is very warm, and that doesn't count toward those aforementioned six kisses.

"If that's what you would like me to do, then I would be most happy to indulge you. After all, I would like it if you were—" What had he said down in the lodging house's public room? "—satisfied with all aspects of this as well, you know."

(And also because kissing him is a very fine way of spending the time and not at all any kind of imposition. Indeed, her hands have already begun to migrate from his shoulders to either side of his face in anticipation of receiving them—)

"That's why I ask, of course. I think it would be very charming to at least pretend at following your instructions."

The flow of her reasoning, instruction and demand, comes as a pleasant thrum under his mouth as Ellis' mouth moves up her neck. Perhaps guided by the framing of her hands, how Wysteria's palms settle on either side of his face, telegraph her intention.

Preoccupied there, Ellis' first, predictable instinct come and go. She could guess at them. Ellis has said variations on such sentiments before.

"I always want you to kiss me," must be familiar and predictable too. He must have said it before. (Or perhaps not; the sweet spot in which Ellis is considering what he wants and inclined to say it aloud tends to be small—) These words are applied to the underside of her jaw, underscored by his arms around her, one palm sliding up her back.

It's not instruction. But his head lifts after it, leaning up to catch her mouth.

Yes, that is more or less what she suspected his answer would be. He isn't at all hard to please like this, is he? Except for when he isn't, of course—in instances where she must explain herself at length to convince him that she knows the theory of what she's doing if not the effect, that she is perfectly aware of what she's asking for, that the presence of nerves doesn't equate to not wanting something.

But now hardly seems like the time to point it out, particularly not with his mouth so very warm under her jaw, and his hands so very present and engaged. Not whole she is in his lap and he is so shockingly naked and there is little more than the slip of her half rucked up chemise imperfectly separating them. When he moves to kiss her, Wysteria is thus very prepared for it and very pleased to have gotten her way. Her hands at the side of Ellis's face shift automatically—his ears in the crooks of her thumbs, her fingers pressing softly into his hair. There is a distinct flexion in her body between his mouth and hands in answer. Her knees tighten briefly about him and it feels like Very good, or maybe See, it promises to be a perfectly fine list.

Later, wherever later finds them, Ellis might ask how she arrived at the number six. There was surely some calculation behind the request.

But in the moment, he is occupied entirely with kissing her. Coaxing her mouth open, fingers pressing down at her back, over her shoulder blade. Wysteria is afforded the benefit of leverage, her weight settled over his thighs, slipping closer by degrees as Ellis' arms unconsciously tightening around her.

His thoughts drift back to that afternoon, stretched out across a bed of clover. Wysteria had her hands in his hair. What was true then is true now still: the combination of proximity and the slide of her fingers into his hair and the way she kisses him, it all leaves very little room for anything else.

And like that day beside the pond, when Ellis eventually breaks long enough for them both to gather a breath, it is all too easy to lean back in. The pause there is brief enough that when he asks, "Is that one?" it is said so closely that their lips brush, that slight contact melting back into a kiss without waiting for answer.

Some small hitch of breath suggests—

An answer undone by his mouth and how eager she is to answer it. How easy it is to deepen that kiss when given even the slightest license to—encouraging him with her tongue, and the further press of fingers through dark curls. And, yes. Very like that warm summer day with all that water drying on their skin, Wysteria's desire bleeds through it. Only here it's a less tentative, purely instinctive thing to lean into him. Wanting him is as recognizable as the satisfaction of being pulled close is.

Whenever the necessary break comes, however brief it is or isn't, Wysteria is swift to say "That's two," in some slanting, keen note close to his mouth. Her following laugh is short and pleasantly breathless, gusting warm in the exceptional narrowness between them.

How happy she is to insist on stealing her third kiss from him.

They have an end point in mind, don't they?

He is only obliged to recall at it when Wysteria breathes the number back to him. No, they aren't simply going to remain here, wound so close, trading kisses back and forth. She has made a request of him. And so Ellis' hands are obliged, somewhere between third and fourth kiss, to leave her back. It is a slow retreat. First fingers catching hold of her hips, thumbs at the bend of her thigh, as if she needs any steadying when she is so securely seated.

Eventually, his palms settle at the tops of her thighs. Hitch fingertips just up beneath the hem of fabric as it falls across her legs.

"Will you let me touch you?" he asks. "Even if I owe you two kisses still?"

As if he will stop kissing her at any point. There's no real danger that Wysteria won't collect in full.

It makes her smile, that roundabout way of angling toward something he wants. She almost laughs at him for it, and only doesn't because he's so pretty and on account of his fingertips trespassing where they ought not yet be.

"I'll allow it," has the high handed mock-seriousness of a blackhaller adjudicating from a seat in Denerim. And then for emphasis, Wysteria squirms a little closer (as if there's any closer to go). "But in exchange, there is something I would like in return. It's a very reasonable sort of trade, Ellis, I assure you."

And as he is well aware, her requests are so often the very definition measured.

"Oh aye?" Ellis prompts, an answering smile curving across his face. His thumb rubs small circles along the inside of her thigh, at ease in spite of all the knowledge that Wysteria's requests are rarely as breezy or simple as she is assuring him now.

Wysteria looks so beautiful, flushed and well-kissed and glowing. The small shift closer only prompts a tightening of his grasp on her thighs. Resists the urge to lean in and put his mouth to her neck, or back to her lips. They are bargaining, they must focus.

Indeed. They're in the midst of highly serious bargaining here. He is required to control his impulses. Nevermind that the circles his thumbs paint prompts some additional ticklish squirming on her part. To counter it (or to distract herself), she combs his hair back from his temples.

"Yes, aye." Some curl at his hairline is wound playfully about Wysteria's finger, draped down over his forehead like a forelock before she arranges it back in the direction it ought to go. "I'll defer my two kisses and let you touch me. But only if you take an oath that, at some point when it suits you, you will ask me to take off my shift. Aye?"

See? Reasonable.

"Will you let me take off your shift, if I ask?"

A beat, then an amendment:

"When I ask."

His fingers have slipped higher. Ellis isn't intending to defer any kisses, owed or otherwise, and while there is some uncertainty as to whether Ellis will ask her to take off her shift, there is certainly some intention in the placement of his hands. The hem of her chemise has been drawn higher by necessity, caught up in the upward movement.

Her fingers feel good in his hair. Breath gone shallow, lips parting as he studies the shape of her mouth, the line of her throat. He's told her four times, but that same sentiment burns quietly in his face still. It's always close at hand, has been for such a very long time. It may as well be written on the skin now.

His hands are far, far higher than the tops of her stockings and their ribbons so carefully folded into neat little bows after Wysteria had peeled herself out of her own hurried bath. Though somehow they, and the broad expanse of his chest, and the muscle coiled across his shoulders and in Ellis's arms, seems less vital than the way he's looking at her. How very gold his light eyes look in the firelight. How lovely that sentiment so stark in his face is. And what a fine thing it is to be looked at so; she can feel it warm and glowing behind her ribs. It's a struggle not to simply kiss him directly in place of an answer.

"I will," she tells him instead, which are very like the words she'd used to marry him. How fond she is of him. Sometimes just looking at him aches pleasantly in the way that pressing on a bruise one has earned by traipsing about somewhere rare and difficult to reach can.

"And," is hastily added, the rapid pull of her breath suggesting a great deal of words are likely to follow. "To be abundantly clear, I would like you to ask. And also that I've made some effort to scrub a great deal of sweat and mud off my person this evening, you know. And that I think you ought to taking that under consideration when weighing whether or not you would care to see me naked. And also that fact that it's winter, and most of my freckles have gone away, and so a great deal of my skin even matches at present. But otherwise, yes. Whenever it suits you to ask, I will let you see the thing done then.

"Would you care to shake on it?"

A number of disparate things: he would have loved all her freckles, has loved her freckles, that he is so fond of that little intake of breath that always precedes any kind of monologue she comes up with, that he wants to kiss her.

His thumbs have trekked high enough to trace the very edges of lace.

No, he doesn't care to shake on it.

"I promise," he tells her, because surely the no is implied in the flex of his fingers over her thighs, at the hinge of her hip. "I promise I'll ask."

And as he is not quite at the right angle to catch her mouth, he lays a kiss to her throat instead.

Good, because she would prefer to keep both her hands in his hair for a bit longer, is what she would have said if he's actually done more than imply refusal with the press his work-rough fingers. Instead, a pleased little sound vibrates under his mouth and she merely tangles her own fingers more securely—not pulling, though knowing that he finds it pleasant puts the urge to so close to the surface that it takes real concentration not fritter away the effect of it rather than reserving it for some moment where she might be certain of the reward of that low sound Ellis can be surprised into making.

Although:

"That's technically five kisses," she reminds him. She can hardly make herself sit any closer in his lap, though some flexing desire to must be evident in the twitch of her thighs under his hands. "If you don't touch me before the next one, you'll have undermined the entire point of the bargain we've just negotiated."

"You'll still make off with the better part of it."

Without any note of complaint. He isn't concerned about giving over all the things Wysteria has requested.

But he does heed her prompting. Wysteria is asking him with her whole body, her hands and mouth. She's been asking since she put herself into his lap. And Ellis is so accustomed to giving her things she wants, even if he circles around them at length, comes at them sideways. Even if being careful with her delays the capitulation.

When he does touch her, it's still the press of fingers through thin satin. Not what Wysteria had maybe been intending or asking for, but a motion that comes with very obvious intent in the firm press underscored with five points of clutching pressure as his opposite hand returns to hold tight at her thigh.

He's still kissing her as he does this. So maybe it does make all this bargaining for nothing. Ellis is hardly concerned.

The chiding note in her throat—Really, Ellis, she has had quite enough of your cheek—turns soft edged under that deliberate contact. But instant relief at being granted what she's been needling for almost directly becomes sudden, blistering awareness. Heat blooms up the back of her neck and pinches at her cheeks. Her fingers shiver in his hair. Yes, she's been considering the semantics of his hands on her for hours. (For days.) Yes, she has been a most careful scholar with respect to how this all ought to be practiced. But the effects of the idea, and all his bare skin, and his mouth first on hers and then so warm elsewhere, and his hands creeping up her thighs all had been more or less negligible until this exact moment as damp satin slides so readily under pressing fingers.

His hand clamped tight at her thigh keeps her put rather than allow for squirming out of some dual sense of desire and bizarrely appealing mortification both—

A short breath. No monologue follows. But is there any way with his mouth on her that Ellis could be ignorant of the heat burning abruptly hot under her skin? It seems highly impossible.

The grip at her thigh eases after a moment, not lifting but loosening, as his fingers press over her. The fabric is thin. Even the passing thought that he might have helped her out of her stockings and undergarments both isn't sufficient to interrupt his ministrations.

It could be mistaken as halting, the way he is touching her. But it is more a reacquaintance. It's been some time since that little attic room. There is intent behind this now. Even in these beginning touches, the skating press of his fingers, Ellis' focus is made obvious. Every mapping slide of fingers over her is meant to catalog, see what makes her breath hitch or her muscles tense, before beginning anything in earnest.

He is still kissing her. Even with his attention so locked in elsewhere, Ellis means to collect on that earlier request. He wants to be kissing her while they do this. Slowly, languorously, easy enough for her to tip back from should it occur to Wysteria that she wants to impart some clear direction or request. Even now, Ellis wants her to have such options.

The thumb of his opposite hand is pressing and rubbing little circles over the inside of her thigh. Unconscious motion, just for the sake of channeling some excess motion while he answers the hitching motion of her hips. If he means to say anything at all, it's subsumed by the open quality of their kiss.

Is this what she wanted? It seems so. Ellis at least is assured enough that he does not pose the question aloud.

Yes, it does seem that way. Surely the soft catch of her breathing and the encouraging press of knees about him, or the absent way in which she shifts after his hand and in his lap, or how eager she is to answer the slow, methodical way he kisses in turn confirms as much. The circling of his thumb tickles, the short hairs at the back of her neck prickle, and she is satisfied with this carefulness—or thinks nothing of it, at the very least. What other way of this should she be at all acquainted with? To that end, Wysteria makes for an agreeably forthright study. It's obvious when some press or slide of his fingers catches her pleasantly short, and what he might do to prompt soft sounds from her to half smother between kisses.

What she doesn't do is draw back to instruct him. Instead, greedy for his attention and unwilling to surrender much of it at all, Wysteria speaks more or less against his mouth in bits and pieces and entirely between kissing him (edited here for clarity and in an effort to avoid a series of overwrought punctuation)—

"You should know that I've just had a wicked thought, Ellis. So you ought to say something to distract me from it—like how pretty you think I am or how much you like kissing me—, or it will stick like a burr and I'll have no choice but to discuss it."

(One of her hands—the one with that sickly green glow buried in its palm—has migrated by instinct from his hair to the edge of the bed's heavy headboard. It's a much more effective point of leverage should she wish to flex absently in against his hand like so.)

"I want to hear it."

A demand made without hesitation, with fully consideration that at times Wysteria's wicked thoughts trend towards what might be made of two chemicals combined in a vial and left to ferment over a long stretch, or what use they might make of that slow-burning fuse left over from Aldrich's last parcel—

Ellis has never had any illusions that he is sufficiently distracting to completely blot out all scientific calculation.

But for the moment, he is chasing after the little noises he can draw out of her under the work of his fingers. Wysteria hasn't checked herself, and the combination of movement over his lap and the breathless gasps of reaction are instructive in and of themselves. Nothing need be said explicitly; she is clear. And this, the work of his fingers through the thin satin, is still Ellis coming towards a goal sideways; even as he touches her, he is considering the point at which he will draw the satin aside and answer the downward cant of her hips properly.

(Luckily, she has already made plans for that long fuse.)

She smiles when next she kisses him, hard enough that the curve of her mouth must be felt in how firmly it's pressed to his, fundamentally pleased with him on two counts—to be indulged, and that he wants to hear it. Maybe if she begins to praise him in such a fashion whenever he expressed some little want or desire of her then he will eventually form a habit of it.

"Well, I've been considering how very shy you are"—accusing him of this while he has a hand up her clothes—"And how poor I am at directing you"—which she'd all but begged him to do—"But how good we have historically been at trading little notes and books and so on."

Here, some quirk of his fingers briefly interrupts her. She sighs into his kiss; the muscle of her thigh made solid from traipsing about fields and through snow and riding horses and walking up and down dozens of stairs each day they spend in Kirkwall flexes under his hand.

"I could send you bits from out of books, I think. They would be in a sense highly allegorical passages, you know. Suggestive of certain potential real world parallels, as it were. Like, say for example, if I were to note down certain pages and line numbers in something like The Shieldmistress—which I haven't read but have heard from other people is somewhat indecent—, then you might refer to the text in question and perhaps consider the note a request. Or, no. Not a request. Merely a theory. A very vague conceptual outline which you might easily refuse without any guilt whatsoever, particularly if you had some lines in a book to recommend yourself."

The curve of his smile widens at the idea of it. Wysteria, poor at directing him.

Even in the newness of their coupling, Ellis has no doubts that she knows her mind and has a sense of what she wants that grows clearer with every passing moment.

Here, his fingers crook and nudge beneath satin. Run through the wet heat of her as she comes to the end of her proposal. It's a slow, circling touch, giving Wysteria time to acclimate as Ellis considers this idea she's outlining.

"I'd like that."

If only to see what sort of passages Wysteria might choose, what commentary she might have on artistic license.

And perhaps to see what she chooses at all, what is presented without critique.

"You might choose something for us to read aloud," he suggests, mouth against her jaw as he touches her, the fingers at her thigh echoing the motion of his opposite hand against that flexing muscle.

"Aloud," is mock aghast, and more or less undermined by the way Wysteria's knees had tightened briefly about him as Ellis's fingers had shifted in under the thin fabric of her smallclothes. Some instinctive flexion of hip or in the wrist attached to the hand which has anchored at the headboard speaks to the fluttering sensation that answers his touch from low in her belly—

"Ellis, I can't have you read risqué material aloud." His mouth is very warm at the underside of her jaw. She can feel it with every syllable. "It would be highly impolite."

All things considered, it's very easy to untangle her fingers from his dark hair, to take his chin in her hand and to playfully steer his mouth back toward hers. There's something of a sweet laugh in her voice, and in how she looks at him from so close that is so very fond and so very keen. She kisses him once; shifting absently into his hand, her own wanders back into his hair.

"Though I am very fond of the sound of your voice."

See, now seems a fine time to give his curls a teasing little tug.

And Wysteria is rewarded with a soft breath of sound, given up to her unchecked. His hand on her thigh lifts, ceding his grip there so he might catch hold of the loosened neckline of her chemise and run his fingers along the fabric, coaxing the ribbons fully apart. It is a precursor to drawing the neckline down; the trajectory of where he might put his mouth once he has finished kissing her is made very clear.

"You will have to instruct me," Ellis tells her. "Tell me what you would like to hear most."

Borrowed words are always easiest, simple to offer up to her. Nevermind the quiet amusement over what may or may not be polite to read aloud between husband and wife. He is happy to take direction in this area. Wysteria, for all her assertions to the contrary, has always been clear about what she'd like him to be telling her.

Between them, Ellis answers the minor shifting of her hips with the slow slide of his fingers. They've done this before. He recalls how he'd touched her then, and he repeats all of that now: runs two fingers through the heat of her, thumb set just so over her. It's different only because of the inescapable awareness of Wysteria's position over him, the suggestion inherent in it. Her fingers in his hair and the shallow catch of their breathing, their mouths so close together, her hand in his hair. All these things pooling together in Ellis' awareness, catching like sparks at coals as he touches her, looking up into her face.

See? How is she meant to be sweet to him when teasing him and pulling at his hair earns her all that in exchange? So she can't very well say, 'I only want you to say what you please, and to make you laugh because I find that the most pleasant out of all the sounds you make', as it's too true and too kind when Ellis seems so often to answer best to scolding. Still, the affection must show in her face—she is such an incredibly poor liar. It must be so starkly obvious when his examination of her is so intent.

"Well obviously you're meant to tell me how beautiful I am," she informs him. It's so much more reflexive to shift into the press of his fingers without that hand at her thigh; her breath catches only a little over it and it turns into a soft laugh after, gusting warm across his mouth because she's going to say something very ridiculous— "And how mad with desire you are for me. I believe that's how they all approach the matter in most of those terrible books. I can't imagine that most of them are very creative, Ellis."

Besides, she would swear he'd promised to give her some instruction. It hardly seems fair to ask for the reverse now, she might say but doesn't. Not because it doesn't meet the requirements for being a little teasing and inconsiderate, though. Rather, the thought is driven briefly away by some motion of his thumb—a sharper hitch of breath followed by a more prominent sigh, and the impulsive press of her mouth to his.

The kiss is brief and kind and not remotely coy, just like the way she asks him very close, "You do want me, don't you?" is too genuine and tender to be at all provocative. It's a real question. Likely, knowing Wysteria, it's the first of a half dozen.

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