Her laughter had mingled with his, unreasonably pleased with herself, and it lingers in the shape of her mouth when she leans back on her elbows to allow him to fully appreciate the intricacies. It is, in fact, armored leather.
“People try to stab me not infrequently,” she says, “it's sensible.”
A solid point, but because at the best of times some of these particular intricacies are tricky enough for people whose hands are obedient and deft— it isn't unpleasant, the way that sitting up brings her closer to him, loosening a series of fastenings and laces behind her to start freeing herself of what keeps her back so straight and her kidneys unperforated. Probably, at least two lady's maids would be ideal for a dress like this, although it isn't impossible to manage on her own — more obvious as she starts to come undone that it is several disparate parts, and not a singular piece of stitched fabric.
It's hard to be completely, blindly impulsive in a dress like this. The actual effort to remove it necessitates a slowing down — an acknowledgment, even appreciation, of the fact that it is a decision to do so, that they are tumbling into bed together and can't pretend later that there hadn't been any opportunities to think better of doing it.
As impulsive as this is (that spirit on Impulse Avenue had had the truth of it, had looked right into their souls and already seen this coming), it’s also intentional. There had been so many moments, so many opportunities even tonight to swerve off the path: choose someone else’s window. Let her in and then bundle her off to the hallway. Not invite her for a nightcap. Not walk off this cliff together.
But the decision is obvious enough by the way he watches the way she works, the appreciative glint in his eye as Gwenaëlle peels herself out of the corset with the ease of long practice, unbuckling her armour. And he says, almost musingly, “You are a little terrifying, you know,”
and it’s not god, you’re beautiful but it means the same thing. Means something more, maybe. He has always been drawn to the people who could burn him.
When Gwenaëlle leans back, Stephen finally takes the opportunity to fix the ridiculous situation with that boot. Kneeling before her — there’s another frisson of sharp unavoidable desire at being in this position, looking up at her from this angle — he hauls on the second boot to drag it off, slower this time, the context immediately different from just a few minutes ago. He sets it aside to join its fellow. Intentional.
“How many knives?” he asks, firstly because he doesn’t want to collide with them later, secondly because he’s wondered, thirdly because his hands are now sliding beneath Gwenaëlle’s skirts, up the length of her legs, knees, thighs, to find and unhook those garters.
Beneath her skirts — the multitude of them — he will find the gartered holsters that don't always actually connect to stockings (or those soft boots she wears on special occasions that look like stockings) but do tonight, and in each of them sheathed a stiletto, and Gwenaëlle flexes her freed toes. She has thought a great deal about his hands, mostly practically,
mostly not allowing herself to even wonder,
there is something to it, watching him kneeling between her knees, the warm weight of his hands sliding over and above the edges of her stockings. Something that quirks her sideways smile, almost visibly considering whether or not to give him a detailed answer.
“Five,” sounds a little like relenting. “You're at the last two. Both boots, and the corset. It was six,” has the air of an arch tease, “when we were dancing.”
Is she going to tell h—
No, she looks too pleased with herself. Secret sixth knife.
Even if she hadn’t caught him asleep, this balance of undressing still would’ve been so vastly askew between them; he dressed simpler in Thedas than New York, with fewer complicated laces and buttons and wrapped robes, more comfortable styles that he could simply pull on. Even the Armani suit he wore tonight would’ve been easy enough.
Still: this is a production, but one of the most enjoyable he’s ever undertaken.
With those last two stilettoes removed and set down with the boots, Stephen scrutinises her answer. He can honestly say he’s never done this much math in the bedroom. He cocks his head, distracted, pressing an absentminded kiss to Gwenaëlle’s knee as he considers. It was six earlier, but she hadn’t been wearing much more in the way of clothes. So where in the world—
—ooooh, she wants to say no, but how transparently obvious that is would belie the lie at once, and she concedes, “Maybe,” meaning yes, of course, put out in the most lighthearted of ways and distracted, more than she feels like immediately admitting, by the brief, warm press of his lips. Probably there's an element of redressing that when she sits up straighter to properly divest herself of corset and bodice — the chemise beneath is delicate and sheer, folds pressed into it by how tightly laced she'd been, the pattern of old, cauterized scars demonstrating how close she'd come to losing a nipple to a rage demon all those years ago, on that lonely road out of this same city.
At the time, it had been the worst thing that had ever happened to her. Now,
well, a lot has happened since then, and she's long since left behind the doubts about her body or her beauty after all of it, assured in herself, and interested in being desired.
It doesn't seem so unreasonable a thing, she's always thought; to want to be wanted. To want to feel that she is.
He laughs, openly, only for the sound to be cut off as she straightens. The chemise is just transparent enough he can see everything, and just substantial enough that it renders her in gauzy shadows and somehow even more tantalising. This is— fun, and comfortable, in a way he hadn’t fully expected, but things with Gwenaëlle have always felt easy even when they’re difficult. And so this is simply an extension of it, of how it has felt natural to be vulnerable around her; to companionably occupy each others’ space; to trust each other. She keeps him on his toes. That sly edge to her smile makes him feel like he’s going a little insane.
So with that maybe and the bodice falling away, Stephen climbs back up and leans a knee astride hers on the edge of the bed. He leans into her again, kisses her again, one hand catching at her jaw and the other fanning across her ribcage once more, then drifting higher, palming a breast through the chemise.
Stephen's mouth smothers a yelped laugh of pleased surprise, and something lower, and it feels both unreal to be vaulting themselves across this line and impossible that they never have before. She catches him to her with a hand splayed on his back, sliding up from his arm, her free hand pulling at the laces that hold the bulk of her skirts tight to her waist, a lot of undignified wriggling happening underneath him as she uses her heels to catch in layers of underskirts and haul them down her thighs, the bed—
they're not, actually, in a hurry. It just seems so patently ridiculous that there should be this much of anything in between them when she wants to — when she wants him, the release of admitting it making her dizzyingly weightless.
Her skirts are tangled around her feet; her knee finds the inside of his thigh, and higher, an insistent and exploratory pressure; she is, as he has noted in the past, direct.
Gwenaëlle might not need the reassurance anymore that she is desirable, desired, wanted, but it’s there nonetheless as her knee forays higher: the hard edge of his cock more than apparent in the fairly thin equivalent of pyjama pants, Stephen already hopelessly turned on, giving a predictable small strangled noise as she nudges up against him.
Crossing this line feels oddly simpler here in Halamshiral, in an anonymous room — the safety of a guest room in an expansive wing on a stranger’s sprawling estate, not neighbours cooped atop of each other in the Gallows and risking gossip at any stray sound. Here the rooms are larger, further apart; there’s more privacy to indulge. Perhaps in a way this is Riftwatch’s equivalent of a trip to an out-of-state work conference, getting more audacious after a few drinks at the hotel bar, following each other back to their rooms.
It’s a collaborative effort to work through the rest of her skirts (although that wriggling is a problem): he purposefully steps on that puddle of petticoats, and it helps Gwenaëlle kick off the last of them, leaving her in trousers and stockings.
He’s getting bolder, now that it’s unceasingly clear that kiss in the Crossroads wasn’t a one-off anomaly, a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity: now, there’s the luxury to explore. To slowly start to find out what she likes, what noise she might make when he mouths at her neck, teeth grazing her pulse point; when he reaches beneath her chemise just for the sake of reaching warm bare skin, the map of her scars beneath his own scarred fingertips.
The sound he makes prompts a teeth-baring, self-satisfied grin— and his teeth draw an equally satisfying hitched breath from her, rewarding every firmer press of his hands or the weight of his body with encouragement, vocal and otherwise. It's not out of her mind to fret a little about the pains of his hands, but it's hard to focus on over the way heat streaks through her everywhere their skin connects and the new sensation of his neat beard scraping against her skin. The way his mouth moves and the way she tilts her head back to jerk the tumble of her curls out of his way, he brushes light enough that it tickles for a moment and she finds herself giggling stupidly and helplessly, caught off-guard.
At every turn, it's been easy with him— why not this, too? Of course this, too.
The breath she takes to steady herself doesn't, really, but she doesn't find herself minding. Draws the knee not between his up alongside his hip, seeking pressure, friction, hot and impatient; her chemise riding up between them snags on her thigh, his wrist, entangling, and she reaches between them to free it—
no, she doesn't. She reaches between them to his cock, in search of another strangled sound or his teeth or just to get to know him better, in this moment. The building ache between her thighs follows the drumbeat of her pulse, and it doesn't make any sense any more to hesitate. “I want you,” is a good start, warmly delivered close to his ear, her lips brushing the skin there, “to tell me what you want.”
Those words against his ear might be one of the hottest things he’s ever heard, and they’re a drumbeat down his spine, rendering his own breathing already unsteady. The inherent question in the command unfurls too many options, too many delicious possibilities, because what does he want? It’s been so long since his thoughts started to drift towards Gwenaëlle in this specific light. It’s been even longer since he’s done this with anyone.
— which, then, with the chill of context settling into place, makes him suddenly realise that this will be his first time since the accident. (The Accident. Capital letter, a stark dividing line between life before and after.) Will those hands still be able to do everything they need to do? There are other scars across his body, from the car crash and sorcerer battles alike, but he doesn’t care much about the sight of those,
it’s more the practicality of it all, the physical capability.
But before Stephen can catastrophise or get too in his head about it (prone to overthinking, this man, and always a victory when someone can distract him), he’s abruptly drawn back by another searching stroke of her hand, his shallow gasp, his fingertips stilled somewhere on her hip. He hadn’t realised how desperately lonely and touch-starved he was until she was touching him.
What do you want, Stephen? In the end, with the same blunt and matter-of-fact (if a little ragged) tone he might use for solving any problem:
“I want,” he says, consideringly, “to eat you out.”
And just in case the modern terminology isn’t the same here — he’s watched Game of Thrones, is it some godawful euphemism like the lord’s kiss — he adds, matter-of-fact, “You further up in the bed, and my mouth between your legs.”
The mirrored familiarity is what makes her smile, crooked — all those times she's briskly offered context for something, uncertain of just how much translates or doesn't — and frankly, given some of the conversations she's had over the years ... she suspects this, particularly, is less of a Thedosian versus rifter potential gap so much as it is,
“Don't worry, I've written too much poetry about my cunt to be unfamiliar with the term,”
a question of, say, lifestyle.
When she spreads her thighs wider, either side of him, she doesn't immediately let go; it's important to hold a man's attention when imparting essential knowledge. “I like it firm,” she says, “and I like to be held down.” Grip is an issue that they're both aware of; the fact that she continues, “Don't worry about bruising me. Use your elbows.” —perhaps suggests that, maybe, she might have thought about this before a bit.
Hypothetically. A little.
And then, aware that she gives a particular impression— that she has run into it before—
“I don't— need,” want, “to be in charge. But I know what I like and I don't mind saying. I want to know what you like.”
It's invitation as much as instruction; she's invested in his pleasure.
His head is tilted, assessing, sizing her up as he listens. This is going to be fun: learning how the other one ticks, and he appreciates the straightforward information, the guidance. This is how they can communicate, make it best for both of them. He's making mental note as intently as if he's studying for an exam (and there is, in fact, going to be a practical test quite shortly).
But, then, Stephen hesitates. It would be empty posturing to pretend he's more suave than he is and that this isn't a problem whatsoever, but there's something to Gwenaëlle Baudin which has always made it astoundingly easy to bare his throat to her (and most likely that's a large part of the reason they're here today), and so:
"You, mostly," is a wry answer. Then, reluctantly admitting, "I don't even know what I like anymore. I haven't, since the crash— It's been a while. So, just. Setting the context accordingly. I'm going to be re-learning this.
"But I can work with that."
Standing there with Gwenaëlle's knees locked around him and his hands on her, he expects the instinctive sting of embarrassment at having set it out there and made himself vulnerable, here are my wounds and here is how you can hurt me; but it doesn't come.
If anything, you, mostly is a dangerous thing to say to a woman who has spent so much of her life pinning her self-worth on being desirable,
but learning other ways to assert herself in the world hasn't made this one feel less good. She has a brief, successful battle with her own ego to set it aside and hear what he's saying— “I can work with that, too,” is a gentle assurance, warm as well as heated when it's accompanied by the slide of her thumb around his cockhead as if to illustrate exactly how. She's pretty sure they can figure it out, between them.
“For the record,” another crooked smile, blowing a stray curl out of her eyes, “you're doing great.”
Just as he accidentally distracts her with his words, she quite purposefully distracts him with her touch and this is deeply unfair, Gwenaëlle, when a man’s trying to have a serious conversation and your hand’s around his cock,
but she says that, and gives that smile, and somewhere in the ache of desire he also feels some other knot of tension unwind in his chest. It takes him another moment to muster his composure before saying, “Ah, good, because I strive for top marks,” with similar impish amusement.
Surveying her, it occurs to Stephen that if they were back in New York, he’d have so many more options: a gentle cushion of air levitating her back onto the bed; coils of nimble telekinesis undoing her buttons; invisible restraints holding her in place. For the first time, he finds himself vaguely annoyed at his altered, lessened magic for reasons beyond portalling everywhere or neater handwriting.
Still. They’ll make do.
So Stephen leans forward and steals another kiss, and then finally presses her backward, tipping them over into the bed properly, his body over hers (I like it firm, she’d said). Then it’s a somewhat undignified shared scramble across the mattress — he’s not going to kneel on the floor, who are you kidding, think of the poor man’s knees — but they eventually relocate Gwenaëlle to the head of the bed, sitting prettily in the rumpled sheets where he’d been sleeping earlier. Stephen takes a moment to admire the view, before he starts working on getting those form-fitting trousers off. There’s going to be more wriggling, more shimmying to peel these off and the stockings alike.
“Good god, you wear too many clothes,” he says, but the faux complaint is warm, in jest. Who doesn’t love unwrapping a present.
Many layers of this dress are already scattered around the end of the bed and the floor nearest; the chemise she hauls over her head and makes a mental note of where she's discarded it, and beneath it — just Gwenaëlle, and her stockings, rolling towards her knees now with nothing holding them in place. She loses interest in immediately removing them in favour of stretching her hands above her head, experimentally, to test her grip on the headboard behind her; for so slight a thing, the long line of her is wonderfully lithe, down to where she digs her heel into the bed to shift herself just a little bit higher.
It's quite the view to use as prim a tone as she does to say, “Not all the time,” a recklessly implicit promise of other times, probably.
At some point, she is going to have to think about what this means beyond the fact that there is just no way to contain in one night all the things she's interested in finding out about him. In the moment — it just feels obvious. Of course this isn't ending here. She draws her knees up, slick enough between them to shine in the low light, “Not to hurry you along, but I am considering starting without you—”
And it's all of a piece with their inability to stop bantering even now, except that she slides the hand she'd had down his trousers between her own legs and watches his face very intently.
Even now it’s an eternal push-and-pull, this needling game between them, nudging each other along and testing each others’ limits and seeing how much they can get away with, what interesting noises and facial expressions the other one might make—
And it’s his blue eyes trapped on the direction and then lazy movement of Gwenaëlle’s fingers, the artful angle of her knee (this is a woman who has posed for nude paintings, if anyone’s forgotten). The sudden dry-mouthed heart-pounding want of it all, ratcheting straight to his dick. The heat in his gaze. It feels like she’s thrown a bomb into the room; it’s a wonder his control on his magic doesn’t slip and the bed canopy doesn’t just catch fire.
It turns out it’s easier, when you’re being egged on.
Stephen reaches up, and hauls off his shirt.
She knew his proportions to a mathematical degree, he’d been briefly shirtless in front of her when she had to tailor his shirt, but the context is entirely different now as he eases up the bed and between her legs.
“You’re a menace,” Stephen says, fond — he’s thought it before, certainly, but is this the first time he’s told her in those exact words? it might very well be, and it’s accompanied by him hitching Gwenaëlle’s knee over his shoulder; his hand sliding up the path of her scars before settling across her abdomen, forearm and elbow pinioning her in place as promised; and batting her hand aside before he replaces it with his mouth, tongue licking a stripe up the very core of her.
And here’s the thing: Stephen might have his doubts about the shakiness of his hands, but his mouth works just fine, and it turns out he does remember how this goes, all hot wet suction as he starts to work her over.
Stephen Strange's shoulders were one of the first things she noticed about him, in person — more than a year ago, now, but hard to forget that will be the rifter, and ushering him up through all the staircases in La Souveraineté — in a sort of matter of fact way, a list of facts about him. He wore a neat beard that reminded her of Stark, and he had broad shoulders, and the elements about him added up to a reasonably handsome and generally tolerable man. She had considered his proclivities in the idle sort of way that she tends to, at some point, wonder about everyone she meets, considering less the visceral appeal of what it might be like to fuck him and more the analytical, hypothetical consideration of how he might like to fuck—
theories she has, off and on, reconsidered at several different points in their acquaintance for various reasons,
—her toes curl against his bare back, her thigh against his shoulder, and there is absolutely nothing abstract or mathematical about her current awareness of every part of his body, starting from his mouth and working out. The warm familiarity of growing used to his nearness versus the way he crowds up to her now, the heavy, hot weight of his arm over her hips, and the way she clamps her hand over her mouth against the wail that he provokes, sealing his lips against her wet flesh. She can't seem to decide where to put her hands, biting down on her own lower lip, sinking her fingers into his hair and twisting.
“I— fuck— Stephen—” is immediately much less articulate, thick with urgency; half the fucking reason she likes to be held down is she is never as patient as she promises herself she will be.
Somehow crossing this line doesn’t feel abrupt, and instead it’s the slow erosion and steady slippery slope of their friendship which eventually brought them here: his face buried in her cunt, her fingers twining into his hair, the scrape of her nails and the push of her heel all pressing him towards her.
Oh, so she’s loud, Stephen finds himself thinking, marveling (although in hindsight why was he surprised?), and this is another new and delightful piece of information he now knows about Gwenaëlle. Filing away these details: the particular keening noise she makes when his tongue finds her clit and circles. The way her hips buck up against him and the muscles in his forearm — built from training, sparring, more combat than he would have seen before his life turned towards sorcery — strain to press her back down into the mattress, holding her in place firm enough no matter the potential bruising.
Because he’s a stubborn perfectionist and he is single-minded, once he’s put himself to a task, and right now the task is to make her keep making those noises. The sound of his name rendered so inarticulate, the best he’s ever heard it.
It turns out this is a good way to shut him up, mouth otherwise singularly occupied, no quips or banter, just Stephen’s beard scraping against her thigh and his erection digging into the mattress where he’s sprawled over her. His jaw moves; and then, scientific, let’s try this, his free hand moves and the press of his fingers soon joins his tongue.
The hand that isn't in his hair — Gwenaëlle reaches above to the purchase she'd found on the headboard in getting settled and pulling herself taut between Stephen and the bed. She's so responsive it'd be nearly impossible to miss what he gets right, her back arching under the first questing press of his fingers; he makes her gasp, catching her breath when she notices she's holding it,
the words, “I like your beard,” with audible surprise come out breathier than she's expecting them to, but it's really the least of her concerns, the heel not against his back bracing into the bed beneath so she can twist her hips to chase just the right angle against his mouth, giving up in the moment on containing the choked off, inarticulate sounds that accompany success.
This likely isn’t new territory for these guest quarters: the charm of enjoying lavish surroundings, marinating in unexpected luxury, well-appointed rooms and solid furniture, Gwenaëlle’s occasional cry swallowed up by draperies, windows, walls, furniture, rugs. And even then, presumably not all the neighbours can remember who, exactly, is staying in which room; all of Riftwatch have been out and about so often.
So with impunity and a lack of self-consciousness, his long clever fingers continue to pump in and out at a steady pace alongside the curl of his tongue, wringing that pleasure out of her,
(testing his own limits)
until, predictably, the dull nerve pain starts to sink in and Stephen feels it slowly approaching like an old nemesis. The increasing stiffness in his wrist, joints sloppily held together with metal, never healed quite right. He’s still able to touch her — still able to bring pleasure with these ugly broken hands, then, thank god, which is more than he knew before — but not able to fuck her for as long as he’d have liked, and as he once would have been able to do. He played the piano, he really was very good with his hands and once proud of it.
It’s okay, he tries to tell himself. He knew this. There are alternatives.
So right after Stephen’s brought her to the brink and teetering right on the edge is exactly when when he has to reluctantly slow down. He withdraws his hand, surfacing for air to catch his shallow breath; once Gwenaëlle peers down at the interruption, he slowly licks his fingers clean and then looks up at her from between her legs, contemplative. it used to be a point of pride to be able to have a woman come on his mouth and fingers alone, but.
“I think we’re gonna have to change tack,” he says. Rationally, he knows that there are too many things he wants to try with her and learn about her, an absolute world’s worth— but there’s still that faint touch of self-deprecation to his tone, self-aware.
Her half choked, mewling sound of protest is involuntary and entirely unreproducable, and if she were thinking all that clearly about anything besides the fact that it's insane they haven't been doing this for the past year and a half because fuck —
well, then she might be embarrassed for a moment, but there's really no space for it. She stares at the ceiling, the hand that had been clenched in his hair resting flat just beneath her breasts, feeling her breathing slow and letting the rush of blood in her ears ease until she can actually parse the thing he's just said to her. Awfully conversational for a man knuckles deep in her. She's going to have to do something about that. In fact,
“Not that I wasn’t enjoying that,” a hard sell at this point, if she’d tried it, “but if you don't mind,”
you know, if it sounds good to him, casually,
“I'd really prefer to come on your prick as a rule.”
(The invitation doesn't get much more gilded than that.)
Straightforward, blunt, matter-of-fact. All the things he likes about her. And if there’s some lurking instinct inside him to doubt her words, well. If there’s one thing he’s known about her, incontrovertibly, from the first time they ever spoke, it’s that Gwenaëlle doesn’t mince words or tiptoe around an inconvenient fact. He strongly suspects she wouldn’t lie about this.
So he breathes out, “I think that can be arranged,” and makes his way back up her body again — only pausing along the way to deliver open-mouthed kisses to her navel, her ribs, her now-naked breast, briefly sucking at a darkened nipple, he can’t resist exploring each piece of bared flesh — until he’s joined her at the head of the bed. His hand still aches, an irritating background noise he’s hoping he’ll stop noticing soon, but as he ponders their positions, how much he does or doesn’t trust his hands to carry his weight through the rest of this, examining the logistics…
I want to know what you like, she’d said.
Still figuring that out. The words in this next exchange might sound oddly clinical but his tone very much isn’t: heated, hungry, speaking this want into being. Words are a kind of magic themselves.
“I’d like you on top,” Stephen says. (You know, if it sounds good to her, casually.) “In my lap.” Beat, the corners of his eyes crinkling into a smile, “If that’s alright.”
The chill has dissipated in the room and this close to them mostly because it'd be damned difficult for it not to, but the air still pebbles her skin when his mouth comes off her breast and she inhales to focus on him and not just on— well, his mouth, mostly. She slides further up the headboard, pushing herself on flat hands, and he can see the gears turning in her head,
strategizing. Yes, and- of sex. It's a funny thing, almost: rarely a position she chooses, but appealing in the context of giving him what he wants, and she's finally learned from a hundred times she only said yes, of course that it still matters what she wants, too. That hasn't always gone without saying.
(It hasn't always been said, either.)
“I can work with that,” she repeats, arch this time, rolling up onto her knees and backing up to guide him nearer— til her back is against the headboard, her knees bracketing his hips and his cock trapped between them as they adjust, brace, settle. Maybe she doesn't need to move as slow or deliberate as she does, exactly. Sweat and slick and saliva mingle and it's a warm, messy press — Gwenaëlle rises up, braced on her toes, a hand wrapped around the base of him and she takes a moment — struck by it, him, how the moonlight cuts across the room and their bodies because she let herself in the fucking window — to kiss him again, careless of the taste of herself. When she slides down onto him, it's not all at once; rolling her hips a little further on every downstroke, not thinking of how long it's been or what that was—
The cool headboard at her back; the heat of him against and inside her. Good.
Finally is the watchword, and he can’t do the math on how long it’s been for him either, not when there’s Gwenaëlle pulling him loose from his braies and lining up and sinking down onto his cock. That slow, slow settling of weight in his lap, the hot wet heat of her surrounding him. He’s sitting up, so they can still reach each other for a messy kiss: his mouth gasping against hers, his hands finding the meat of her hips, digging in to grind her down against him.
This, this is what he’d wanted for a while and hadn’t even known he’d wanted, having so meticulously packed this side of himself away; compartmentalised as irrelevant, immaterial to his life here in Thedas, unlikely to become an issue.
But it’s sparking to life again, now, now, with the experimental roll of Gwenaëlle’s hips as she fully takes him in. Stephen’s turn, now, for a ragged groan buried against her mouth, his fingers flexing against her skin, a forearm curving around her lower back as a mirror to where he’d braced against her before.
“Gwenaëlle—” he starts, a strangled murmur.
(He has instantly forgotten about the pain. There’s just the heat, the friction, the slowly rocking up into her, chasing her mouth as they start to move.)
He says her name and she says — something, Orlesian and heated against his lips, her forehead pressed to his between kisses and breaths and sweat tacking her curls around her hairline, the nape of her neck. She slides her hand along his arm behind her until she's gripping his wrist, slanting her hips just so to grind her clit down against his pelvis every time she draws him in, losing whatever clever thing she might imagine she's got to say on shuddering breaths and the very abrupt reminder of just how close he'd got her to the edge before they rearranged themselves.
She starts to say something else — his name again, maybe — and loses it against his jaw, bowing forward, trembling and tensing around him, thighs taut and her cunt tightening, spasming, tumbling over that edge he'd walked her up to and not crying out only because she's taking heaving, dragging breaths—
nails digging in at his wrist, at the back of his shoulder,
she kisses him through it, bumps her cheekbone into his, pressing together and murmuring, “Fuck,” urgently near his ear, then: “I'm— good,” with a kind of ragged overconfidence, wildly sensitive and uninterested in even entertaining the idea of pausing when she's just hitting her stride finding a rhythm that works for him.
(Gwenaëlle would never lie about how she likes to get off. She'd never fake an orgasm. She has, a couple of times, tried to pretend she wasn't having one to stop her partner from slowing down.)
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portalling) wrote2022-04-02 01:17 pm
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“People try to stab me not infrequently,” she says, “it's sensible.”
A solid point, but because at the best of times some of these particular intricacies are tricky enough for people whose hands are obedient and deft— it isn't unpleasant, the way that sitting up brings her closer to him, loosening a series of fastenings and laces behind her to start freeing herself of what keeps her back so straight and her kidneys unperforated. Probably, at least two lady's maids would be ideal for a dress like this, although it isn't impossible to manage on her own — more obvious as she starts to come undone that it is several disparate parts, and not a singular piece of stitched fabric.
It's hard to be completely, blindly impulsive in a dress like this. The actual effort to remove it necessitates a slowing down — an acknowledgment, even appreciation, of the fact that it is a decision to do so, that they are tumbling into bed together and can't pretend later that there hadn't been any opportunities to think better of doing it.
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But the decision is obvious enough by the way he watches the way she works, the appreciative glint in his eye as Gwenaëlle peels herself out of the corset with the ease of long practice, unbuckling her armour. And he says, almost musingly, “You are a little terrifying, you know,”
and it’s not god, you’re beautiful but it means the same thing. Means something more, maybe. He has always been drawn to the people who could burn him.
When Gwenaëlle leans back, Stephen finally takes the opportunity to fix the ridiculous situation with that boot. Kneeling before her — there’s another frisson of sharp unavoidable desire at being in this position, looking up at her from this angle — he hauls on the second boot to drag it off, slower this time, the context immediately different from just a few minutes ago. He sets it aside to join its fellow. Intentional.
“How many knives?” he asks, firstly because he doesn’t want to collide with them later, secondly because he’s wondered, thirdly because his hands are now sliding beneath Gwenaëlle’s skirts, up the length of her legs, knees, thighs, to find and unhook those garters.
Maybe he’s thought about it before.
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mostly not allowing herself to even wonder,
there is something to it, watching him kneeling between her knees, the warm weight of his hands sliding over and above the edges of her stockings. Something that quirks her sideways smile, almost visibly considering whether or not to give him a detailed answer.
“Five,” sounds a little like relenting. “You're at the last two. Both boots, and the corset. It was six,” has the air of an arch tease, “when we were dancing.”
Is she going to tell h—
No, she looks too pleased with herself. Secret sixth knife.
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Still: this is a production, but one of the most enjoyable he’s ever undertaken.
With those last two stilettoes removed and set down with the boots, Stephen scrutinises her answer. He can honestly say he’s never done this much math in the bedroom. He cocks his head, distracted, pressing an absentminded kiss to Gwenaëlle’s knee as he considers. It was six earlier, but she hadn’t been wearing much more in the way of clothes. So where in the world—
Then a guess, amused: “Was it in your hair?”
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At the time, it had been the worst thing that had ever happened to her. Now,
well, a lot has happened since then, and she's long since left behind the doubts about her body or her beauty after all of it, assured in herself, and interested in being desired.
It doesn't seem so unreasonable a thing, she's always thought; to want to be wanted. To want to feel that she is.
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So with that maybe and the bodice falling away, Stephen climbs back up and leans a knee astride hers on the edge of the bed. He leans into her again, kisses her again, one hand catching at her jaw and the other fanning across her ribcage once more, then drifting higher, palming a breast through the chemise.
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they're not, actually, in a hurry. It just seems so patently ridiculous that there should be this much of anything in between them when she wants to — when she wants him, the release of admitting it making her dizzyingly weightless.
Her skirts are tangled around her feet; her knee finds the inside of his thigh, and higher, an insistent and exploratory pressure; she is, as he has noted in the past, direct.
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Crossing this line feels oddly simpler here in Halamshiral, in an anonymous room — the safety of a guest room in an expansive wing on a stranger’s sprawling estate, not neighbours cooped atop of each other in the Gallows and risking gossip at any stray sound. Here the rooms are larger, further apart; there’s more privacy to indulge. Perhaps in a way this is Riftwatch’s equivalent of a trip to an out-of-state work conference, getting more audacious after a few drinks at the hotel bar, following each other back to their rooms.
It’s a collaborative effort to work through the rest of her skirts (although that wriggling is a problem): he purposefully steps on that puddle of petticoats, and it helps Gwenaëlle kick off the last of them, leaving her in trousers and stockings.
He’s getting bolder, now that it’s unceasingly clear that kiss in the Crossroads wasn’t a one-off anomaly, a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity: now, there’s the luxury to explore. To slowly start to find out what she likes, what noise she might make when he mouths at her neck, teeth grazing her pulse point; when he reaches beneath her chemise just for the sake of reaching warm bare skin, the map of her scars beneath his own scarred fingertips.
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At every turn, it's been easy with him— why not this, too? Of course this, too.
The breath she takes to steady herself doesn't, really, but she doesn't find herself minding. Draws the knee not between his up alongside his hip, seeking pressure, friction, hot and impatient; her chemise riding up between them snags on her thigh, his wrist, entangling, and she reaches between them to free it—
no, she doesn't. She reaches between them to his cock, in search of another strangled sound or his teeth or just to get to know him better, in this moment. The building ache between her thighs follows the drumbeat of her pulse, and it doesn't make any sense any more to hesitate. “I want you,” is a good start, warmly delivered close to his ear, her lips brushing the skin there, “to tell me what you want.”
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— which, then, with the chill of context settling into place, makes him suddenly realise that this will be his first time since the accident. (The Accident. Capital letter, a stark dividing line between life before and after.) Will those hands still be able to do everything they need to do? There are other scars across his body, from the car crash and sorcerer battles alike, but he doesn’t care much about the sight of those,
it’s more the practicality of it all, the physical capability.
But before Stephen can catastrophise or get too in his head about it (prone to overthinking, this man, and always a victory when someone can distract him), he’s abruptly drawn back by another searching stroke of her hand, his shallow gasp, his fingertips stilled somewhere on her hip. He hadn’t realised how desperately lonely and touch-starved he was until she was touching him.
What do you want, Stephen? In the end, with the same blunt and matter-of-fact (if a little ragged) tone he might use for solving any problem:
“I want,” he says, consideringly, “to eat you out.”
And just in case the modern terminology isn’t the same here — he’s watched Game of Thrones, is it some godawful euphemism like the lord’s kiss — he adds, matter-of-fact, “You further up in the bed, and my mouth between your legs.”
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“Don't worry, I've written too much poetry about my cunt to be unfamiliar with the term,”
a question of, say, lifestyle.
When she spreads her thighs wider, either side of him, she doesn't immediately let go; it's important to hold a man's attention when imparting essential knowledge. “I like it firm,” she says, “and I like to be held down.” Grip is an issue that they're both aware of; the fact that she continues, “Don't worry about bruising me. Use your elbows.” —perhaps suggests that, maybe, she might have thought about this before a bit.
Hypothetically. A little.
And then, aware that she gives a particular impression— that she has run into it before—
“I don't— need,” want, “to be in charge. But I know what I like and I don't mind saying. I want to know what you like.”
It's invitation as much as instruction; she's invested in his pleasure.
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But, then, Stephen hesitates. It would be empty posturing to pretend he's more suave than he is and that this isn't a problem whatsoever, but there's something to Gwenaëlle Baudin which has always made it astoundingly easy to bare his throat to her (and most likely that's a large part of the reason they're here today), and so:
"You, mostly," is a wry answer. Then, reluctantly admitting, "I don't even know what I like anymore. I haven't, since the crash— It's been a while. So, just. Setting the context accordingly. I'm going to be re-learning this.
"But I can work with that."
Standing there with Gwenaëlle's knees locked around him and his hands on her, he expects the instinctive sting of embarrassment at having set it out there and made himself vulnerable, here are my wounds and here is how you can hurt me; but it doesn't come.
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but learning other ways to assert herself in the world hasn't made this one feel less good. She has a brief, successful battle with her own ego to set it aside and hear what he's saying— “I can work with that, too,” is a gentle assurance, warm as well as heated when it's accompanied by the slide of her thumb around his cockhead as if to illustrate exactly how. She's pretty sure they can figure it out, between them.
“For the record,” another crooked smile, blowing a stray curl out of her eyes, “you're doing great.”
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but she says that, and gives that smile, and somewhere in the ache of desire he also feels some other knot of tension unwind in his chest. It takes him another moment to muster his composure before saying, “Ah, good, because I strive for top marks,” with similar impish amusement.
Surveying her, it occurs to Stephen that if they were back in New York, he’d have so many more options: a gentle cushion of air levitating her back onto the bed; coils of nimble telekinesis undoing her buttons; invisible restraints holding her in place. For the first time, he finds himself vaguely annoyed at his altered, lessened magic for reasons beyond portalling everywhere or neater handwriting.
Still. They’ll make do.
So Stephen leans forward and steals another kiss, and then finally presses her backward, tipping them over into the bed properly, his body over hers (I like it firm, she’d said). Then it’s a somewhat undignified shared scramble across the mattress — he’s not going to kneel on the floor, who are you kidding, think of the poor man’s knees — but they eventually relocate Gwenaëlle to the head of the bed, sitting prettily in the rumpled sheets where he’d been sleeping earlier. Stephen takes a moment to admire the view, before he starts working on getting those form-fitting trousers off. There’s going to be more wriggling, more shimmying to peel these off and the stockings alike.
“Good god, you wear too many clothes,” he says, but the faux complaint is warm, in jest. Who doesn’t love unwrapping a present.
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It's quite the view to use as prim a tone as she does to say, “Not all the time,” a recklessly implicit promise of other times, probably.
At some point, she is going to have to think about what this means beyond the fact that there is just no way to contain in one night all the things she's interested in finding out about him. In the moment — it just feels obvious. Of course this isn't ending here. She draws her knees up, slick enough between them to shine in the low light, “Not to hurry you along, but I am considering starting without you—”
And it's all of a piece with their inability to stop bantering even now, except that she slides the hand she'd had down his trousers between her own legs and watches his face very intently.
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And it’s his blue eyes trapped on the direction and then lazy movement of Gwenaëlle’s fingers, the artful angle of her knee (this is a woman who has posed for nude paintings, if anyone’s forgotten). The sudden dry-mouthed heart-pounding want of it all, ratcheting straight to his dick. The heat in his gaze. It feels like she’s thrown a bomb into the room; it’s a wonder his control on his magic doesn’t slip and the bed canopy doesn’t just catch fire.
It turns out it’s easier, when you’re being egged on.
Stephen reaches up, and hauls off his shirt.
She knew his proportions to a mathematical degree, he’d been briefly shirtless in front of her when she had to tailor his shirt, but the context is entirely different now as he eases up the bed and between her legs.
“You’re a menace,” Stephen says, fond — he’s thought it before, certainly, but is this the first time he’s told her in those exact words? it might very well be, and it’s accompanied by him hitching Gwenaëlle’s knee over his shoulder; his hand sliding up the path of her scars before settling across her abdomen, forearm and elbow pinioning her in place as promised; and batting her hand aside before he replaces it with his mouth, tongue licking a stripe up the very core of her.
And here’s the thing: Stephen might have his doubts about the shakiness of his hands, but his mouth works just fine, and it turns out he does remember how this goes, all hot wet suction as he starts to work her over.
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theories she has, off and on, reconsidered at several different points in their acquaintance for various reasons,
—her toes curl against his bare back, her thigh against his shoulder, and there is absolutely nothing abstract or mathematical about her current awareness of every part of his body, starting from his mouth and working out. The warm familiarity of growing used to his nearness versus the way he crowds up to her now, the heavy, hot weight of his arm over her hips, and the way she clamps her hand over her mouth against the wail that he provokes, sealing his lips against her wet flesh. She can't seem to decide where to put her hands, biting down on her own lower lip, sinking her fingers into his hair and twisting.
“I— fuck— Stephen—” is immediately much less articulate, thick with urgency; half the fucking reason she likes to be held down is she is never as patient as she promises herself she will be.
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Oh, so she’s loud, Stephen finds himself thinking, marveling (although in hindsight why was he surprised?), and this is another new and delightful piece of information he now knows about Gwenaëlle. Filing away these details: the particular keening noise she makes when his tongue finds her clit and circles. The way her hips buck up against him and the muscles in his forearm — built from training, sparring, more combat than he would have seen before his life turned towards sorcery — strain to press her back down into the mattress, holding her in place firm enough no matter the potential bruising.
Because he’s a stubborn perfectionist and he is single-minded, once he’s put himself to a task, and right now the task is to make her keep making those noises. The sound of his name rendered so inarticulate, the best he’s ever heard it.
It turns out this is a good way to shut him up, mouth otherwise singularly occupied, no quips or banter, just Stephen’s beard scraping against her thigh and his erection digging into the mattress where he’s sprawled over her. His jaw moves; and then, scientific, let’s try this, his free hand moves and the press of his fingers soon joins his tongue.
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the words, “I like your beard,” with audible surprise come out breathier than she's expecting them to, but it's really the least of her concerns, the heel not against his back bracing into the bed beneath so she can twist her hips to chase just the right angle against his mouth, giving up in the moment on containing the choked off, inarticulate sounds that accompany success.
It's a big house. They're probably fine.
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So with impunity and a lack of self-consciousness, his long clever fingers continue to pump in and out at a steady pace alongside the curl of his tongue, wringing that pleasure out of her,
(testing his own limits)
until, predictably, the dull nerve pain starts to sink in and Stephen feels it slowly approaching like an old nemesis. The increasing stiffness in his wrist, joints sloppily held together with metal, never healed quite right. He’s still able to touch her — still able to bring pleasure with these ugly broken hands, then, thank god, which is more than he knew before — but not able to fuck her for as long as he’d have liked, and as he once would have been able to do. He played the piano, he really was very good with his hands and once proud of it.
It’s okay, he tries to tell himself. He knew this. There are alternatives.
So right after Stephen’s brought her to the brink and teetering right on the edge is exactly when when he has to reluctantly slow down. He withdraws his hand, surfacing for air to catch his shallow breath; once Gwenaëlle peers down at the interruption, he slowly licks his fingers clean and then looks up at her from between her legs, contemplative. it used to be a point of pride to be able to have a woman come on his mouth and fingers alone, but.
“I think we’re gonna have to change tack,” he says. Rationally, he knows that there are too many things he wants to try with her and learn about her, an absolute world’s worth— but there’s still that faint touch of self-deprecation to his tone, self-aware.
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well, then she might be embarrassed for a moment, but there's really no space for it. She stares at the ceiling, the hand that had been clenched in his hair resting flat just beneath her breasts, feeling her breathing slow and letting the rush of blood in her ears ease until she can actually parse the thing he's just said to her. Awfully conversational for a man knuckles deep in her. She's going to have to do something about that. In fact,
“Not that I wasn’t enjoying that,” a hard sell at this point, if she’d tried it, “but if you don't mind,”
you know, if it sounds good to him, casually,
“I'd really prefer to come on your prick as a rule.”
(The invitation doesn't get much more gilded than that.)
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So he breathes out, “I think that can be arranged,” and makes his way back up her body again — only pausing along the way to deliver open-mouthed kisses to her navel, her ribs, her now-naked breast, briefly sucking at a darkened nipple, he can’t resist exploring each piece of bared flesh — until he’s joined her at the head of the bed. His hand still aches, an irritating background noise he’s hoping he’ll stop noticing soon, but as he ponders their positions, how much he does or doesn’t trust his hands to carry his weight through the rest of this, examining the logistics…
I want to know what you like, she’d said.
Still figuring that out. The words in this next exchange might sound oddly clinical but his tone very much isn’t: heated, hungry, speaking this want into being. Words are a kind of magic themselves.
“I’d like you on top,” Stephen says. (You know, if it sounds good to her, casually.) “In my lap.” Beat, the corners of his eyes crinkling into a smile, “If that’s alright.”
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strategizing. Yes, and- of sex. It's a funny thing, almost: rarely a position she chooses, but appealing in the context of giving him what he wants, and she's finally learned from a hundred times she only said yes, of course that it still matters what she wants, too. That hasn't always gone without saying.
(It hasn't always been said, either.)
“I can work with that,” she repeats, arch this time, rolling up onto her knees and backing up to guide him nearer— til her back is against the headboard, her knees bracketing his hips and his cock trapped between them as they adjust, brace, settle. Maybe she doesn't need to move as slow or deliberate as she does, exactly. Sweat and slick and saliva mingle and it's a warm, messy press — Gwenaëlle rises up, braced on her toes, a hand wrapped around the base of him and she takes a moment — struck by it, him, how the moonlight cuts across the room and their bodies because she let herself in the fucking window — to kiss him again, careless of the taste of herself. When she slides down onto him, it's not all at once; rolling her hips a little further on every downstroke, not thinking of how long it's been or what that was—
The cool headboard at her back; the heat of him against and inside her. Good.
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This, this is what he’d wanted for a while and hadn’t even known he’d wanted, having so meticulously packed this side of himself away; compartmentalised as irrelevant, immaterial to his life here in Thedas, unlikely to become an issue.
But it’s sparking to life again, now, now, with the experimental roll of Gwenaëlle’s hips as she fully takes him in. Stephen’s turn, now, for a ragged groan buried against her mouth, his fingers flexing against her skin, a forearm curving around her lower back as a mirror to where he’d braced against her before.
“Gwenaëlle—” he starts, a strangled murmur.
(He has instantly forgotten about the pain. There’s just the heat, the friction, the slowly rocking up into her, chasing her mouth as they start to move.)
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She starts to say something else — his name again, maybe — and loses it against his jaw, bowing forward, trembling and tensing around him, thighs taut and her cunt tightening, spasming, tumbling over that edge he'd walked her up to and not crying out only because she's taking heaving, dragging breaths—
nails digging in at his wrist, at the back of his shoulder,
she kisses him through it, bumps her cheekbone into his, pressing together and murmuring, “Fuck,” urgently near his ear, then: “I'm— good,” with a kind of ragged overconfidence, wildly sensitive and uninterested in even entertaining the idea of pausing when she's just hitting her stride finding a rhythm that works for him.
(Gwenaëlle would never lie about how she likes to get off. She'd never fake an orgasm. She has, a couple of times, tried to pretend she wasn't having one to stop her partner from slowing down.)
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