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I wake in the middle of the night.
And the wanting that never fully leaves my soul wakes with me.
His body encloses mine, made by God Almighty to fit me in the confines of our little box bed, suiting my shorter frame like an envelope does a love letter.
(Before him, I never thought of myself as love. Since him, there are whole hours where I think of myself as nothing else.)
I wriggle carefully around in the space the linens leave me, one limb at a time. I turn as slowly as the moon's pale visage while the Revenge creaks and groans around us in the waves.
He doesn't stir – any more than my movement requires his sleeping form to make room for me, that is.
When face to face at last, I breathe his warm, rum-scented breath. His talented, long-fingered hands move restlessly in dreams, exploring the jut of my shoulder blades over the scars of my seven pointed star... and the new hot weals of tonight's delicious caning.
I had reeled in our own strange shared pleasure then, needing no more mundane sensual release (although I knelt in worshipful bliss when he held my head in one palm and his prick in the other and made my tongue chase the pearls of seed he cast into my facial hair).
That was then, bare hours ago in our evening alone together.
This is now, when the moonlight caresses his cheek and brow. It lays its weightless caul over his face: a veil of cool light between us.
To be your bride, Sir, I think. I raise up on my elbow and lean in, nuzzling the point of my nose into his brunet sideburn. Every time I think I've discovered an end to being owned by you – or perhaps merely its perfection, its completion – I discover there's still more that I need to give, more that I find owed, more in me that belongs as your birthright.
Marry me, I mouth silently against his jawline. Testing how the phrase feels in my mouth: not a question or a plea but a demand. Marry me, make me yours even more, forevermore. Can I speak it aloud, somehow, someday? "Speak now, or forever hold your peace."
Hmmmmm... my piece.
My sword belt hangs in my closet nook and my throwing knives are stowed evenly around the room -- but my cock stirs and thickens against the lush softness of his belly.
"Ohhh," I breathe, nuzzling around his earlobe and into the little curls behind his ear. He smells of laundry soap and sweat and roses and hibiscus, these things that I know only because I know his favorites among Bonnet's – Stede's – bath oils, and I held the bottle before I could hold him, and I read the label before I could read his gaze.
On the cord of his throat I find a trace of my own dragon's blood scent. I circle it with a spiral nuzzle; I bracket it with the far curves of a lemniscus. My scent on my lover's body is my infinity, my eternity.
The vibrating hum against the tip of my nose is the sign that I've woken Lucius at last.
"Can't sleep, my clever boy?"
His voice is groggy with dreams – and flowing with affection.
"Did sleep," I correct, a rasping whisper. "Woke and wanted you, Sir."
"We didn't take care of you earlier."
"We did enough, earlier."
"But that was then, and this is now," he continues blithely, and I am hot all over to be so completely understood. "And it won't wait until morning," Lucius adds.
"I can go take care of it," I'm quick to qualify, although I shudder to think of it. Alone in the head (or maybe in Stede's ensuite; I'm aware that Stede could sleep through a marching band parade but Edward would wake, recognizing my stealthy footfalls, and wonder at my motives), alone with my hand in stinking darkness, to spill my spunk into a chamber pot or my handkerchief or straight into the seething seafoam if I dare it –
"The fuck you say," Sir growls against my temple and I'm rock hard and trembling the next instant. "Every orgasm you have from the moment of our bonding until the instant we die rightfully belongs to me, doesn't it."
It's not a question, nor did it ever for even a second think it should be, but I answer obediently nonetheless. "Yes, Sir," I gasp.
"Mmmm. I believe we have some lube left." His left hand locks like a steel shackle around the bend of my right elbow; it tells me to think well and remember, and not leave to check.
"The bottle has at least a third left in it, and a new bottle still unopened in my desk drawer," I vouch, breathless.
"And clean rags?"
"Yes, Sir." They used to be an old pair of the Swede's trousers -- but I surely won't hold that against them...
I want to know what he's thinking. But I feel massive Dragon wings spreading in my mind already, sweeping away every cogitation, every agitation. Their mantling leaves nothing but anticipation and perfect service: Sir will take care of me, if only I believe and obey.
He kisses me then, and I melt. I shimmy my hips, rutting in tiny shifting strokes against his abdomen, my lips answering his with equal passion. His magic has claimed me again, destroyed me again; the Revenge could burn down around our ears and I wouldn't know it. I am his to use, his to empty, his to enjoy. My future pleasure is already doubled, as long as it serves his will.
"Here's what you'll do," he whispers when we part long enough to inhale. "Bring me the oil and uncork it -- a little onto my fingertips. Then you'll kneel on the bed with your thighs spread and put your cock in my mouth. I'm tired and I don't want to have to make an effort at all. So you'll fuck yourself back and forth between my tongue and hand until you climax. And you won't make me wait for it; I want to go right back to sleep."
Not at all, Sir? I want to beg him. Surely I could savor, even if only for a few seconds...
"And you'll warn me when you're ready to come," the Mastersmith continues in a voice of dark heat and steel. "I'll take you all the way into my throat; I'm feeling so lazy I don't even want to have to swallow. Understood?"
I hear myself stammer when I say "Y-yes. Yes, Sir."
You'd think from my blushing hesitancy that this was our first night playing this game… but this was at least the dozenth where he'd given me relief under the guise of demanding my release from me.
Every single time I quivered when I fetched the bottle and uncorked it, and poured a thin runnel of oil into the gutter between his right index and middle fingers, watching in the dim moonlight as he stirred it over them with the pad of his thumb. Every similar evening I was breathing hard already, groin heavy and aching, while I straddled his right arm and heard the key on his silver bracelet chime as his fingers sought up into me.
Tonight is no different.
His left hand folds our thin pillow in half and pins its bulk under his cheek, the better to lift his sleepy head. "I want to hear your pleasure," is the last thing his lips say before my obedient prick fills them.
"Ohhh," I sigh, sinking to my hilt. "Oh God. Sir!"
He takes me so easily. I'm not possessed of anything like Stede Bonnet's monstrous affront to natural order between my thighs – but I've always thought it was sufficient to the job at hand, whatever that might be. At the full depth of my forward stroke his mouth presses a kiss against the lowest curve of my abdomen, and I feel the ridge of my glans slide past the secret wet machinery in the turn of his throat.
I reach blindly for some sort of firm foundation then; my left palm finds the rough wall of the berth and my right finds Sir's shoulder, and I shudder and strain as I draw back.
The sensation dances over the line between just enough and too much; to withdraw is to be penetrated by his fingers, to tremble and gasp at the spiral they describe on the node of ecstasy in my core.
Even in the witching hour of the night he makes my bliss into the most wonderful torment. Even half-asleep he pushes me beyond myself into a place cool and quiet. I am overwhelmed by hungry, freezing flames. I am suffering deliciously, feeling my skin bead with hectic icy sweat.
Sir's eyes are closed, as if my agony is meaningless – and therefore easily dismissed.
Nights like this are the only ones that he loves to hear me whimper.
And plead I do. And beg, I surely do. Sir, I breathe, being quiet while I can still manage it. God, Sir. Your mouth. Your throat, around me. You feel so fucking good for me, Sir. My God. Please, Sir. Please...
The dimples at the corners of his mouth smooth, and the wrinkles at the corners of his eyes deepen. His tongue is a slick landscape, a map to a country I've only seen in these moments of extremis, near dying or near climax or in the strangeness between.
It's too soon and I can't stop it.
"Sir, I'm going to come!," I manage, squirming.
His only answer is to press me forward with his oiled fingertips inside me, his stroke relentless. Sir knows mercy when he beats me, hits me, cuts me with his words or merely our blades.
He's utterly ruthless when I begin to keen and shake. I have no choice when my groin spasms – and my orgasm is claimed inside his throat without the moon ever seeing its pearly stripes.
Now I lean my forearm on the wall and my head against my bicep, sobbing softly. His fingers still and hold; they hover over my core like a threatening thunderhead.
You see: there's a beautiful price to be paid for waking Sir from his sleep for my own selfish needs.
The price is having those needs fulfilled until there's nothing left in me.
When the first sensitivity fades he pushes me into himself again as if he's trying to bring his fingers to his mouth through the medium of my flesh. Tears rise up in my eyes.
"Oh God," I whisper, the muscles in my flanks twitching and misfiring. If I was trying to stall before all pretence of it is gone now – every instant I delay is another that his grip will demand out of me. "God, Sir."
No, I have no wit left in the witching hour, by the light of a cool moon as vicious as the Killing Sun in its own way. Sir's moon, the ravenous, commanding, thirsty moon! "Sir," I babble, grinding down, prodded forward, slipping back against the milking pressure. There are no words left on my breath but "Sir" and "God" and I find once more that they weigh the same.
The next orgasm frees the tears that the earlier beating couldn't quite reach. Sir moans his approval – and wordlessly affirms it again, when my hand holding his shoulder moves to cradle the back of his head. One more, I think, toes flexing and curling over the shadowy air next to our bed, desperate yet gripping nothing. My blunt fingernails plane the rough wood of the wall utterly heedless of splinters.
When my final release of the night arrives, I no longer care who I wake with my cries. The dregs of my climax spill in the bowl of his tongue this time as they do every time, at the end.
Sir savors his cruelty to me again before he swallows his little nightcap.
And each time I think I could never love him more completely than I do right now.
And yet, each time I find that I do. God help me, defend me, and sustain me – I do!
I go soft quickly in his suckling mouth, with my cheeks wet from weeping. He lets my flaccid prick fall away at last.
"Get me the rag," he says in place of anything more tender; I hiccup as his fingers withdraw. It takes me two tries for my knees to hold firm, then I stagger to the closet and reach into the rag bin.
A little bit of water from the carafe and I wipe his fingers clean again.
I toss the rag into the laundry basket; I don't like mixing wet and dry laundry but Sir's patience at this hour won't let me pause to spread the scrap of cloth out to properly dry. Lucius raises the sheet again and I crawl beneath it -- a letter bound into its envelope once more. His right arm doth embrace me; his banner over me is love, my fevered brain muses.
He unfolds the pillow to let me share it. He presses a kiss to my forehead and my restless, splintered thoughts go still. "So you'll sleep now?" the Mastersmith asks coolly, although the answer must be obvious.
"Yes, Sir. I'll sleep again, now."
"There's my good boy," he replies, nuzzling the wet valleys of my tear-stained cheeks.
I'm not actually asleep the next minute, although I know I must seem to be. No, it's the place between sleep and death, where the body cannot move yet the ears still hear. Now it's Sir's turn to nuzzle my cheeks, to inhale the scent of my flesh and hair, to bask in the fading warmth of my post-orgasmic blush.
"I love you," Lucius whispers. Sovereign of my heart. Master of my spirit. “Tha gaol agam ort, mo anam cara,” he repeats himself on the merest exhale, as if not to wake me.
I go to my rest then as I'll someday go to the last repose of every mortal being: embraced by the divine. The internal hearing is the last to subside, and from the oubliette of my soul come these future words:
The stars come out; the fragrant shadows fall
About a dreaming garden still and sweet,
I hear the unseen bats above me bleat
Among the ghostly moths their hunting call,
And twinkling glow-worms all about me crawl.
Now for a chamber dim, a pillow meet
For slumbers deep as death, a faultless sheet,
Cool, white and smooth. So may I reach the hall
With poppies strewn where sleep that is so dear
With magic sponge can wipe away an hour
Or twelve and make them naught. Why not a year,
Why could a man not loiter in that bower
Until a thousand painless cycles wore,
And then -- what if it held him evermore?