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.)
For that moment when it seems like he might actually slow down, with a murmured “You sure?”, but Gwenaëlle immediately banishes that thought by driving him deeper again. Her nails press harder, and even that’s a pleasurable kind of sting, anchoring him in his body and reminding him where he is.
And for the first time in years, Stephen Strange’s mind has emptied into white-hot pleasure, all higher-level thinking wrecked, for once not distantly multitasking or thinking about reports he has to write or the fate of the world or the war,
no, it’s just the physical movement and pressure, the slick slide of their bodies against each other and him inside her, Gwenaëlle’s mouth against his ear, Stephen’s against her throat. He nips her skin, tasting the sweat on her neck as they set that rhythm and stick to it.
It won’t take long for him to follow her to that cliff: it’s been years with only his cramping hand for company; not an extremely athletic and extremely enthusiastic partner riding his lap. Any rigid self-control soon unravels beneath her, and he knows that orgasm’s about to hit him like a freight train— which is right about when some last-minute rational instinct finally reasserts itself.
“Wait, can rifters,” presumably the answer’s no because there’s no half-Fade toddlers running around, but decades of habit mean he suddenly, urgently finds himself asking that panicked question before it’s too late, “do I— protection—”
The answer to that first question is a general probably not, but no one's sure, and there is a good answer to the second one—
she hasn't had to maintain a birth control regimen regularly for years now, but she was a slut in Orlais, she knows how to not get pregnant,
—but instead of any of those good and thoughtful answers that a calmer, more conversational exchange might have produced, what actually happens in the moment is that Gwenaëlle gasps an incredulous laugh and says, “Now?” and honestly, is that not a fair response. She grips his arm tighter, trying to control what is definitely an inappropriate and wildly timed fit of the giggles, destabilising the rock of her in his lap,
she's never actually thought before about if someone could feel her laughing through her cunt, which seems like some sort of oversight, so at least there are still new horizons after all.
“It's fine,” she manages, “Got a recipe. Tastes terrible. Come inside me.”
At this point it may be difficult for him to do anything else.
And it turns out that he can actually feel it, a curious but uniquely enjoyable sensation, that ripple of heaving laughter which actually makes Gwenaëlle clench even harder around his dick, and it’s ridiculous and infectious and not what he expected but it tips him right over the edge, Stephen thrusting into her one last time, his face buried in the crook of her neck with a moan as he lets go.
Just emptiness, and pleasure, and warm fond amusement, and a satisfying ache.
Once that cresting wave finally ebbs, it leaves him collapsing over the sheets in a boneless sprawl over her, an arm still slung around her, half-gasping and half-laughing. Listen, he’d just never had to consider those logistics before —
“Jesus christ,” he says, and, “My timing’s terrible,” but he’s too amused, a little giddy, euphoric with sated pleasure.
“I can't believe,” hiccuping a laugh, her hair fanned out on the bedding underneath them, one knee still bent around his waist, “that you are the head healer of an organisation where nearly everyone has fucked at least one of their colleagues and you've not at least asked Derrica,”
who surely, surely must know, and it's actually a toss up whether Derrica or Stephen might be preferable to someone who needed to ask if it's meant to look like that, but—
“I'm not telling you,” she says to the ceiling, “you have to go have that conversation. It's your professional responsibility.”
He’s weathered indescribable horrors by Derrica’s side in the infirmary, but somehow the prospect of this one takes the cake. “Gwenaëlle, I’m not going to Derrica for sex ed, are you joking,” Stephen says, mock-aggrieved-horrified, but he can’t help that laugh still bubbling up under his words.
It seems a fairly safe assumption that rifters can’t get anyone pregnant. If he lets his thoughts drift too far in that direction, he often falls into the trap of remembering that he’s probably more ghost than man — but for tonight, at least, the existential anxiety is kept at bay. He feels reassuringly warm and solid and alive here, entangled in the sheets with Gwenaëlle, sweat drying on their bodies. It’s messy and biological, but alive.
“Ouais, and when some newly arrived rifter comes to ask you how these things are done here,” her arch amusement still threaded through the words, bumping her knee into his hip, oh is that so, Dr Strange, “what, you're going to tell them you couldn't bring yourself to ask her?”
Her fingers thread through his hair, far more loosely than she'd gripped it between her thighs, a casual and casually proprietary affection— easy, when this moment still feels small and private and theirs without the intrusion, yet, of the consequences of their actions.
“I'm not surprised you haven't been asked yet, mind. You have all the bedside manner of me.”
“Yep. Thankfully, I don’t think I project the air where people like to ask me about it. Their problems are more along the lines of having been stabbed by a bandit or Venatori, less about condom use or weird moles.”
But ugh, she does have a point, his professional reputation would never recover if someone did ask and he didn’t have the answer, so…
“Fine,” Stephen says with an exaggerated world-weary sigh as if he is the most suffering man in the world, “I will ask my platonic workwife about her knowledge of rifter sex and probably die of mortification in the process. Happy?”
Gwenaëlle’s fingers trailing through his hair is so comfortable and pleasant, and the banter astonishingly easy as it always is, that he leans a little closer to capture her lips in another kiss. (Just because he wants to, and can. The metaphorical door is open; he can do that now, and how remarkable and lovely that is.)
Instead of as it happens or just mouthing platonic workwife back to him, she is pleasantly content to be kissed — to draw one into several, languid and unhurried, stretching that moment between them. Probably they should disentangle, clean up — she has a bed she's meant to be sleeping in that isn't this one — but it's hard to think of a good reason to hurry any of that along when he's so warm and near and tastes like sweet wine and sex.
It is hard to decide if she wants to point out he doesn't need to specify rifter, or if it's much funnier to imagine that he will, although—
“Don't make it sound like you want to hear all about Loxley,” she says, “unless you do, in which case by all means.”
Derrica's knowledge of birth control and her knowledge of rifter sex may be two separate conversations.
Menace!! He snorts, amused, “I do not. Although he is relevant, and therefore I hate this prospect already, just FYI.”
Probably they should disentangle and clean up. As a first grudging step, Stephen finally shifts slightly to pull out of her, until some small noise of protest from Gwenaëlle draws him back to not give up all the skin-to-skin contact: there’s a rearranging of limbs, her thigh still against his hip, his arm flung over her midriff. (What if she just slept here, he thinks, and almost as quickly shies away from that tempting thought.) For now, he’s in that pleasant haze of having worked particular muscles which haven’t been worked in a while, and it’s just— nice, lying here with her. In the warm, contented silence, his fingers absentmindedly trail down Gwenaëlle’s arm.
And now that they’re talking, his brain’s starting to hum back to coherence again, gears turning and ticking over like a machine left unattended but still trundling away in the background. So he finds himself revisiting their earlier conversation, before this incredibly effective distraction, suddenly pivoting back without much segue and as if no time had passed:
“—So, wait, your nighttime rendezvous. Does that mean you’ve some additional spies for Riftwatch?”
The longer she stays laying here, cosy in their entanglement, the harder it's going to be to convince herself that she really does need to find all of her clothes and ... maker, she's not even going to try and get dressed, she'll just have to bundle herself up in her cloak and carry the rest—
For a moment when she tips her head to look at him she's stupidly blank, and then it clears: oh, right. She'd done something tonight besides Stephen.
“No, well— maybe?” lilts up into a question, though not one she's posing to him, really. “Maybe. Nothing so direct as all that, but ... connections,” with a tip of her hand, “to Briala's network here. And we didn't have none, before, but it certainly doesn't hurt to cultivate. I wasn't sure if my name was going to help or hinder me, to be frank, but I think ...”
She thinks that she is having too nice a time, curled up with him, to start unpacking the way that Alix having not cursed her name to all and sundry has offered a hint of relief to an old wound she has only grown accustomed to the sluggish bleed of.
“I don't know that I could ask much of them, right now,” she says, eventually. “But it's an avenue. Potential.”
The fact that Gwenaëlle just rolls with Stephen’s insane pivot of topic, drifting back to plainly discussing work even with her naked in his bed— it’s another thing he likes about her, so very much.
But the subject is genuinely interesting to him: skullduggery and secrets and skulking about on rooftops. “I expect asking for a favour’s the wrong way to start off a new connection. But at least it’s a cracking open a door. And I suppose Rome wasn’t built in a…” he pauses, eyebrows crinkling, “Minrathous wasn’t built in a day? Is that a saying here? Anyway. You get the gist. Potential. It’s something to build towards.”
“Mmm, it's building credibility,” is delivered partially into his shoulder before she sprawls onto her back, exhaling and considering the shape of the thing. (Not this thing, which they probably should have discussed and which she isn't going to ruin the lazy moment after by broaching now.)
“Personal relationships, faces to names and organisations. I know a fellow who knows, etcetera, etcetera.”
With that conclusion reached, the silence sinks in again with the age-old question of: what do you do, after. He doesn’t want her to feel unwanted; similarly doesn’t want her to feel like he’s too needy, too clingy. God but it’s a difficult balance, and Stephen’s always been atrocious at handling it. By mutual agreement, he’d ejected women from that sterile penthouse apartment in Manhattan; had never lingered at theirs himself; until Christine, until it was someone he had to see at work the morning after and realised he wanted to see her again and again and again.
(Oh god it’s going to be the same for Gwenaëlle, isn’t it— he’s going to see her around the Gallows, in the infirmary—)
There’s probably a subtle panic about this question looming just over the metaphorical hill, but Stephen stubbornly looks away from it. That’s a problem for later, probably. He exhales against her shoulder; pivoting again, his thoughts always ping-pong around, but she’s good at keeping up:
“Okay. So, just for the sake of saying it aloud: you can stay if you like, and ordinarily I’d quite like you to,” he says, “but if the goal was discretion in getting back to your room…”
It’ll get more difficult, as the rest of the household wakes up and dawn eventually breaks and she’s not found back in her room.
The prospect of having to move isn't a thrilling one — and it's too easy to doubt I'd like you to, an instinct that has little to do with Stephen other than being wildly unfair to him — but the fact remains that trying to get back to her own room and luggage in the cold light of morning without having to have any sort of conversation with anyone else...
She'd already been caught leaving by Orlov in the first place. Coming back from her 'personal matter' carrying all of her clothes is not going to do wonders for her credibility.
“Ugh,” is a profound groan, exhaling a harsh breath as she stretches, sits up; her hair a mess of curls, half her back a mess of scars from the rage demon's claws. Shaking a hand through her hair to loosen it out, she doesn't — besides sitting up — rush to disentangle, though it's an immediate acknowledgment of the point. “It was the goal,” she sighs; if she'd been strategically planning, it could have been an excuse, but she really hadn't. Hadn't seen this coming,
though she should have, she thinks.
“I should go,” she says, the slightly unconvincing tone of someone convincing herself.
Despite the fact that Stephen was the one to broach the idea of leaving, there’s still the sudden kneejerk instinct to backtrack: nevermind, I take it all back, I changed my mind. Please don’t go.
As Gwenaëlle straightens and her back comes into view, his hand trails down the knobs of her spine, unconsciously counting the vertebrae, the scars on her back he hadn’t gotten a look at earlier. There’s still so much about her he wants to explore.
But if he keeps touching her, that’s a fast track to them never parting. And what’s the right thing to say here, now, in this circumstance? I’m glad you chose my window? Let’s do this again?
He bites down on the thought; straightens up behind her instead, and tries to convince himself too. “Don’t get caught,” Stephen says, a smile in his voice, still warm. “Holler if you are and you need backup.”
What’s he gonna do, come flying to her defense barefoot and dick flapping in the halls of an Orlesian manor? (I mean, maybe.)
The prospect thereof prompts an amused glance back over her shoulder — and it's hard to deny the appeal of just burrowing back down into the bedding beside him, taking in how much closer he is when he sits up and the dissipating warmth where his hand was on her back. It takes some stern self-discipline to slide off the side of the bed—
although leaving is not any quicker a process than undressing her was, as she yanks her slouching stockings toward her thighs instead of finally taking them off, searching around the mess they've made for where she discarded this and that. The chemise is the only part she bothers pulling back on; she'll ring a servant for a bath when she's in her own room, she decides, acutely conscious now she's standing up that she is leaking. The rest of her clothes she flings into a pile and uses her skirts like a sack, gathering her cloak around herself for the sake of— well, not modesty. Discretion. Making the prospect of bumping into anyone else marginally less awkward. The last thing she gathers up are her boots, taking in the room for a moment to be sure he's not going to have to shove her smallclothes in a pocket before someone tidies this room,
and him, in tangled bedsheets and out of clothing.
Self-discipline only goes so far. Gwenaëlle leans a hand on the edge of the bed and leans closer, her pile of things to be urgently laundered shoved under one arm, catching him in a kiss that would be briefer if making sure he's still thinking about her when she's gone wasn't mostly the point.
“Goodnight, Stephen.”
Stockings are quieter on tile than barefeet. The door slips shut terribly softly behind her, and there's nothing to strain listening to, just— quiet.
![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
portalling) wrote2022-04-02 01:17 pm
![[community profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/community.png){kind=small}
no subject
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.”
no subject
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.
no subject
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.)
no subject
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.)
no subject
And for the first time in years, Stephen Strange’s mind has emptied into white-hot pleasure, all higher-level thinking wrecked, for once not distantly multitasking or thinking about reports he has to write or the fate of the world or the war,
no, it’s just the physical movement and pressure, the slick slide of their bodies against each other and him inside her, Gwenaëlle’s mouth against his ear, Stephen’s against her throat. He nips her skin, tasting the sweat on her neck as they set that rhythm and stick to it.
It won’t take long for him to follow her to that cliff: it’s been years with only his cramping hand for company; not an extremely athletic and extremely enthusiastic partner riding his lap. Any rigid self-control soon unravels beneath her, and he knows that orgasm’s about to hit him like a freight train— which is right about when some last-minute rational instinct finally reasserts itself.
“Wait, can rifters,” presumably the answer’s no because there’s no half-Fade toddlers running around, but decades of habit mean he suddenly, urgently finds himself asking that panicked question before it’s too late, “do I— protection—”
no subject
she hasn't had to maintain a birth control regimen regularly for years now, but she was a slut in Orlais, she knows how to not get pregnant,
—but instead of any of those good and thoughtful answers that a calmer, more conversational exchange might have produced, what actually happens in the moment is that Gwenaëlle gasps an incredulous laugh and says, “Now?” and honestly, is that not a fair response. She grips his arm tighter, trying to control what is definitely an inappropriate and wildly timed fit of the giggles, destabilising the rock of her in his lap,
she's never actually thought before about if someone could feel her laughing through her cunt, which seems like some sort of oversight, so at least there are still new horizons after all.
“It's fine,” she manages, “Got a recipe. Tastes terrible. Come inside me.”
At this point it may be difficult for him to do anything else.
no subject
Just emptiness, and pleasure, and warm fond amusement, and a satisfying ache.
Once that cresting wave finally ebbs, it leaves him collapsing over the sheets in a boneless sprawl over her, an arm still slung around her, half-gasping and half-laughing. Listen, he’d just never had to consider those logistics before —
“Jesus christ,” he says, and, “My timing’s terrible,” but he’s too amused, a little giddy, euphoric with sated pleasure.
no subject
who surely, surely must know, and it's actually a toss up whether Derrica or Stephen might be preferable to someone who needed to ask if it's meant to look like that, but—
“I'm not telling you,” she says to the ceiling, “you have to go have that conversation. It's your professional responsibility.”
no subject
It seems a fairly safe assumption that rifters can’t get anyone pregnant. If he lets his thoughts drift too far in that direction, he often falls into the trap of remembering that he’s probably more ghost than man — but for tonight, at least, the existential anxiety is kept at bay. He feels reassuringly warm and solid and alive here, entangled in the sheets with Gwenaëlle, sweat drying on their bodies. It’s messy and biological, but alive.
no subject
Her fingers thread through his hair, far more loosely than she'd gripped it between her thighs, a casual and casually proprietary affection— easy, when this moment still feels small and private and theirs without the intrusion, yet, of the consequences of their actions.
“I'm not surprised you haven't been asked yet, mind. You have all the bedside manner of me.”
no subject
“Yep. Thankfully, I don’t think I project the air where people like to ask me about it. Their problems are more along the lines of having been stabbed by a bandit or Venatori, less about condom use or weird moles.”
But ugh, she does have a point, his professional reputation would never recover if someone did ask and he didn’t have the answer, so…
“Fine,” Stephen says with an exaggerated world-weary sigh as if he is the most suffering man in the world, “I will ask my platonic workwife about her knowledge of rifter sex and probably die of mortification in the process. Happy?”
Gwenaëlle’s fingers trailing through his hair is so comfortable and pleasant, and the banter astonishingly easy as it always is, that he leans a little closer to capture her lips in another kiss. (Just because he wants to, and can. The metaphorical door is open; he can do that now, and how remarkable and lovely that is.)
no subject
It is hard to decide if she wants to point out he doesn't need to specify rifter, or if it's much funnier to imagine that he will, although—
“Don't make it sound like you want to hear all about Loxley,” she says, “unless you do, in which case by all means.”
Derrica's knowledge of birth control and her knowledge of rifter sex may be two separate conversations.
no subject
Probably they should disentangle and clean up. As a first grudging step, Stephen finally shifts slightly to pull out of her, until some small noise of protest from Gwenaëlle draws him back to not give up all the skin-to-skin contact: there’s a rearranging of limbs, her thigh still against his hip, his arm flung over her midriff. (What if she just slept here, he thinks, and almost as quickly shies away from that tempting thought.) For now, he’s in that pleasant haze of having worked particular muscles which haven’t been worked in a while, and it’s just— nice, lying here with her. In the warm, contented silence, his fingers absentmindedly trail down Gwenaëlle’s arm.
And now that they’re talking, his brain’s starting to hum back to coherence again, gears turning and ticking over like a machine left unattended but still trundling away in the background. So he finds himself revisiting their earlier conversation, before this incredibly effective distraction, suddenly pivoting back without much segue and as if no time had passed:
“—So, wait, your nighttime rendezvous. Does that mean you’ve some additional spies for Riftwatch?”
no subject
For a moment when she tips her head to look at him she's stupidly blank, and then it clears: oh, right. She'd done something tonight besides Stephen.
“No, well— maybe?” lilts up into a question, though not one she's posing to him, really. “Maybe. Nothing so direct as all that, but ... connections,” with a tip of her hand, “to Briala's network here. And we didn't have none, before, but it certainly doesn't hurt to cultivate. I wasn't sure if my name was going to help or hinder me, to be frank, but I think ...”
She thinks that she is having too nice a time, curled up with him, to start unpacking the way that Alix having not cursed her name to all and sundry has offered a hint of relief to an old wound she has only grown accustomed to the sluggish bleed of.
“I don't know that I could ask much of them, right now,” she says, eventually. “But it's an avenue. Potential.”
no subject
But the subject is genuinely interesting to him: skullduggery and secrets and skulking about on rooftops. “I expect asking for a favour’s the wrong way to start off a new connection. But at least it’s a cracking open a door. And I suppose Rome wasn’t built in a…” he pauses, eyebrows crinkling, “Minrathous wasn’t built in a day? Is that a saying here? Anyway. You get the gist. Potential. It’s something to build towards.”
no subject
“Personal relationships, faces to names and organisations. I know a fellow who knows, etcetera, etcetera.”
Such things don't happen overnight, after all.
no subject
With that conclusion reached, the silence sinks in again with the age-old question of: what do you do, after. He doesn’t want her to feel unwanted; similarly doesn’t want her to feel like he’s too needy, too clingy. God but it’s a difficult balance, and Stephen’s always been atrocious at handling it. By mutual agreement, he’d ejected women from that sterile penthouse apartment in Manhattan; had never lingered at theirs himself; until Christine, until it was someone he had to see at work the morning after and realised he wanted to see her again and again and again.
(Oh god it’s going to be the same for Gwenaëlle, isn’t it— he’s going to see her around the Gallows, in the infirmary—)
There’s probably a subtle panic about this question looming just over the metaphorical hill, but Stephen stubbornly looks away from it. That’s a problem for later, probably. He exhales against her shoulder; pivoting again, his thoughts always ping-pong around, but she’s good at keeping up:
“Okay. So, just for the sake of saying it aloud: you can stay if you like, and ordinarily I’d quite like you to,” he says, “but if the goal was discretion in getting back to your room…”
It’ll get more difficult, as the rest of the household wakes up and dawn eventually breaks and she’s not found back in her room.
no subject
She'd already been caught leaving by Orlov in the first place. Coming back from her 'personal matter' carrying all of her clothes is not going to do wonders for her credibility.
“Ugh,” is a profound groan, exhaling a harsh breath as she stretches, sits up; her hair a mess of curls, half her back a mess of scars from the rage demon's claws. Shaking a hand through her hair to loosen it out, she doesn't — besides sitting up — rush to disentangle, though it's an immediate acknowledgment of the point. “It was the goal,” she sighs; if she'd been strategically planning, it could have been an excuse, but she really hadn't. Hadn't seen this coming,
though she should have, she thinks.
“I should go,” she says, the slightly unconvincing tone of someone convincing herself.
no subject
As Gwenaëlle straightens and her back comes into view, his hand trails down the knobs of her spine, unconsciously counting the vertebrae, the scars on her back he hadn’t gotten a look at earlier. There’s still so much about her he wants to explore.
But if he keeps touching her, that’s a fast track to them never parting. And what’s the right thing to say here, now, in this circumstance? I’m glad you chose my window? Let’s do this again?
He bites down on the thought; straightens up behind her instead, and tries to convince himself too. “Don’t get caught,” Stephen says, a smile in his voice, still warm. “Holler if you are and you need backup.”
What’s he gonna do, come flying to her defense barefoot and dick flapping in the halls of an Orlesian manor? (I mean, maybe.)
no subject
although leaving is not any quicker a process than undressing her was, as she yanks her slouching stockings toward her thighs instead of finally taking them off, searching around the mess they've made for where she discarded this and that. The chemise is the only part she bothers pulling back on; she'll ring a servant for a bath when she's in her own room, she decides, acutely conscious now she's standing up that she is leaking. The rest of her clothes she flings into a pile and uses her skirts like a sack, gathering her cloak around herself for the sake of— well, not modesty. Discretion. Making the prospect of bumping into anyone else marginally less awkward. The last thing she gathers up are her boots, taking in the room for a moment to be sure he's not going to have to shove her smallclothes in a pocket before someone tidies this room,
and him, in tangled bedsheets and out of clothing.
Self-discipline only goes so far. Gwenaëlle leans a hand on the edge of the bed and leans closer, her pile of things to be urgently laundered shoved under one arm, catching him in a kiss that would be briefer if making sure he's still thinking about her when she's gone wasn't mostly the point.
“Goodnight, Stephen.”
Stockings are quieter on tile than barefeet. The door slips shut terribly softly behind her, and there's nothing to strain listening to, just— quiet.