will my affection pull the strings?

[subsidence]

[It was only a quick trip down the hall to the kitchenette. Estinien could have gotten it herself. She told Aymeric just that for ages, and when she was saying it, the kitchen was much further away. It was all the way across Aymeric's manor. But early on, she would grunt and climb out of bed before he could put his feet down on the floor. She would tell him she could get it herself, 'twas only a blasted pudding or some biscuits from the pantry...

One night, with starlight filtering past the window curtains, Aymeric pressed her back down against the bed and kissed her forehead. He told her to stay where she was, and this time, she obeyed him. He came back to her with scones slathered in lemon curd and he fed them to her by hand. She was very quiet while she let that happen, and he was patient about her silence. How vulnerable, to be fed from her lover's fingertips. He thumbed the last of the lemon zest from her mouth and set the plate on the bedside table. Estinien curled and uncurled her toes, over and over again, while she listened to him go back to sleep. Then, the next night, she rolled over and whispered, "Aymeric, I'm hungry."

It's summer, so dawn comes early, and Estinien's cravings usually hit just a few hours before then. In the beginning of this vulnerable arrangement, she would tell Aymeric what she wanted and he would retrieve it for her. Now she lets him choose. It's a wonder and a secret, but the Saint of Ferndale lets Aymeric choose what to feed her. Some nights, he does give it to her bite by bite; other times, she knows how tired he is, and how willing he is to stay awake to feed her despite it, so she'll swat away his hands and tell him to go to sleep. And then there are her favorite nights: those on which they eat together. They'll pass bites between each other, barely able to see more than the outline of his hand, the line of her neck and shoulder, for the darkness of the hour. Sometimes she falls asleep listening to the slow way he appreciates buttery shortbreads and their layer of smooth chocolate. Sometimes he falls asleep with his head on her stomach, and wakes up with crumbs in his hair. When he wakes up and finds them, he has to kiss her. He just has to kiss her when he's granted the evidence of how she stays with him through the night. And she knows that she did that to him. She sowed that need with worse than her crumbs.

This night would be one to see Aymeric back to sleep. He's brought Estinien her plate of sweets, and she can already hear his breathing begin to even out. She would be all right with that. If he had brought her anything else to eat, she would be all right with his quick doze. But this... But what he's cut and served for her... Well, it's not meant to be eaten by just one person. The cake was a feat of butter and silken icing, the jam in between the layers not too sweet, the spices a fragrant surprise. Their wedding cake was so large that neither Aymeric nor Estinien could have eaten it themselves; it's meant to be eaten by both of them. Even now, the second night into their honeymoon, the great section of cake Aymeric made sure to bring along remains enough for both of them, and too much for one of them. Too much, even, for Estinien and her growing appetite, her growing belly, Aymeric's children growing inside her.

Sucking on the tines of her fork, she considers Aymeric's easy breathing. Then she scoots so she's resting on her side, nudging up against him--belly first, then more of her, and one foot hooked over his ankle. She finds his face in the darkness. It's not hard; her ears are keen for the way he breathes, and from whence it comes. His cheek, his chin... and here is his mouth, his bottom lip, and up closer to his teeth. Her thumb is what touches him there, bringing with it a dollop of icing.]

Here, now, [she says. Her voice is as soft as his mouth; she wants to give him what she gets. She spent so long refusing to do that.] You have some, too.

Comments

[subsidence]

[In the place where Estinien lived as a dead woman, it was warm. The summers were like the summers of her girlhood. Once enough of her cowardice had ebbed, and she stepped back into the Coerthas snows, she realized the minutiae she'd forgotten of the cold. She marched through the snow and covered her ears with her hands. Then she ground her teeth and uncovered them. How could she face Ishgard's head of state if she had grown so distant from her countrymen--if she were a woman who would falter in the cold?

She saw her reflection in the armor of a Temple Knight when they brought her to Aymeric. Blasphemy was all they charged her with; she didn't understand. All she had done was tell them her name, and they brought her before the Lord Commander himself without any mercy in their touch. As they bid her kneel before him--with their hands heavy on her shoulders, and her knees bending only for Aymeric's sake--she saw the smear of her reflection in a knight's shining breastplate. How long her hair had grown, how it was tough like leather in the damp, freezing weather. The grime of her traveling clothes. The awful colors of her face: white, then purple, around her eyes. Was that how Aymeric knew her, recognized her, after she spent so long away? The smear of her, kneeling before him?

The Estinien who came home to Ishgard would not recognize the Estinien of now: soft hair, clear eyes, all the gauntness gone. That was a vagabond, and this is a saint. This is a lady. The Estinien who came home to Ishgard would not recognize the contentment of this woman who lies beside her husband. Worse, she would not recognize the bliss of what it is to be thanked by Aymeric for providing him with any pleasure. It took her nigh on twenty years to learn it. Estinien, a woman who had carried more eyes than most, had been so blind for so long.

She guides her thumb over his bottom lip to withdraw it from his mouth.

Of course she doesn't deserve all that he is willing to give her, nor his willingness to give it. Of course she knows that. In her pain, her spite, she had left the both of them barren; in her greed, she over-tilled his fields to keep him from yielding any harvest. Seems she stopped just shy of salting his earth. That there's anything left for her is a miracle, and that there's so much left for her... Of course she doesn't deserve it. But he's giving it to her, and she cannot ever reject it again. She cannot deny him another harvest, or the winter will truly overtake him. What she can do, then, is...

For three. That Aymeric can give her so much is no less than divinity. His hand against her belly is yet another reminder of how tangibly he has brought the heavens upon her. If he wishes for her to grow for him, she will grow mightily. She will yield such a bounty so as to dwarf all the harvests she denied him. Ever has Aymeric said the things Estinien could not, inspired the things she could not; he rouses and rallies with words and deeds in equal measure, and, indeed, with beliefs. Estinien didn't mean to fall in love with him as a young woman, but the things he believed in... the things he said and did... Estinien never knew what to tell him. She only knew to do, and not well. Tonight, Aymeric knows what to say to her. When she told him she was pregnant with his child, he knew what to say to her. He told her he would keep her safe, and when he said it, she could believe it.

Estinien only knows what to do.

It's all action, then: she shifts beneath his hand, against his hand, wishing just as he does to grow and further fill his palm. She can't nudge into his touch with her belly without pushing up her hips as well, but she's got no cause to be shy about doing that. Gravity is gaining hold of her a little more each day. Now she takes her hand from his face to reach around in the dark, to readjust herself, before she's searching for his mouth again. Her answer, her insistence, is to bring another thick swipe of icing along with her thumb, but her other hand finds his face this time too. She's pushing his hair away from his forehead, then leaning in to kiss it. She keeps her lips there while Aymeric sucks on her thumb a second time, and she strokes his temple. Slowly, slowly. At last she has learned to touch him slowly.

The longer her thumb is against his tongue, with his lips around her knuckle, the warmer her breathing grows. She has much in common with the ocean air tonight: the warm way it rolls in, the dampness it brings. The soft shushing. She likes this. It's slow, and she likes it. She's guiding the third dollop of icing into his mouth when she tells him,] It's ours. [The wedding cake, of course. He would let her polish off what's left, but it's theirs.] If I am eating for three, that makes us a family of four. Wouldn't do to leave you by the wayside.

[Not ever again.

She's still caressing his forehead, with his mouth around her thumb.] And I find I like this just as much--your tongue is no less pleasant here than it is elsewhere. [A little stretch, perhaps; this is just her thumb. But if the stretch of her leg is any indication, she means just what she's said. She's trying to get that much closer to Aymeric, drawing her leg over both of his. Between her thighs, she's gone from damp to as wet as she was on their wedding night. The smell of the icing, perhaps. They ate it together then, too.]

[embankment]

[The icing is delicious, yes, a triumph of the senses, but Aymeric is feeling less invested in its flavor by the time he's supping on that third dollop. The real prize is what brought it to him in the first place: Estinien's thumb, and the most eager crook of it. He's lavish about licking along the seam of her knuckle, enjoying the slight saltiness of her skin and then the odd bite of the perfume that lingers beneath it. This sour and earthy accent is what she wore throughout the day--one of the many little gifts he has given her for the grandeur of her company. You wouldn't know just from looking at her that she once made a home for herself in crevices and caves, in the depths of the forest, on the highest mountains, within the lowest and coldest calderas. You wouldn't know just from looking at her that she didn't think of Ishgard as home and instead spent all of her time as a vagabond, as a mercenary, aimless and encrusted in filth. You wouldn't know--once upon a time, she would have rather been anywhere but lying here in bed with her husband on her honeymoon. The pad of her thumb is so smooth, and you wouldn't ever know it had ever been anything but. It didn't take all that much, in the end, to see her weathered skin repainted as the picture of health.

Aymeric has the bruises on his thigh to prove just how often he pinches himself and wonders if this is more than a long-drawn-out trick of the mind. It shouldn't be possible for such a feral creature as she to have decided it's time to put down her head, and to do it here, right beside his. Every day, as gravity takes more of a hold of her, Aymeric has to pinch himself until it hurts and he can breathe freely again. A family of four. Never in his wildest imaginings did he ever think Estinien would say the inconceivable to him, and so earnestly at that. This is no less a feat than imagining other stars and the lives that must dwell upon them.

But he isn't content with just having her pressed up against him, feeding him sweet morsels. He has as much the capacity for doing, lest you forget, and so within moments he has his hands secured at Estinien's impressive hips. He has the strength in his limbs still to turn himself over and to bring her along with him, until he's lying flat on his back and she's made to straddle the core of him. He wants to feel the weight of her bearing down on him, pinning him in place. This is gravity, and gravidity, and the reality of their situation.] By my own reckoning, [he says, once she has relinquished his mouth,] I have yet to touch my tongue to even half as many places as I was hoping to degust. My memories of you are getting to be a mite outdated, you see, and it wouldn't do to lose my bearings in the days and nights to come... [Even in the darkness, it shouldn't be difficult to hear the smile in his voice. The lasciviousness of it, either. The raw and primaeval desire. Of course, he has always been a most attentive lover, willing to do anything for Estinien's pleasure, but it's in recent days that he has known the most singular need to make love to her as often and thoroughly as possible. Her impending motherhood has only added to the straightforward urgency of his touch.

Needless to say, his cock is standing full and well at attention, now. He can't help but roll his hips to bring them even closer together.] Ahh, gods... [Even in the darkness, Aymeric's hands are unmistakable when they try--and fail--they fail to--wrap themselves around the breadth of her hips, then the wealth of her waist. There's no chance in any layer of hell that she will be fitting into her drachen armor anytime soon. Not a single piece of it could hope to contain her. His palms, the restless interlopers, now move down and along her heavier thighs, marveling at how much softer they are. Yes, he can still detect an undergirding of muscle to them, but he has his doubts about how high she would be able to leap, even if she were called to.]

If we should keep this up, we would not be stopping at just the four... the four of us, Estinien...

[It's halfway to a warning, and halfway to a promise.]

You do realize that, don't you?

[subsidence]

[At last, he can bring her along with him. When he moves, she moves with him. It used to be that she would demand and enforce a great distance herself, so what miracle has her moving with him, moving along with him? Being taken, being brought? What miracle: she stays with him.

She was always controlled and careful about undoing any buttons or buckles or laces she may have bore. When she would steal in through Aymeric's window or otherwise trespass, their fucking was desperate enough that it may have warranted the snapping of her buttons or the tearing away of her laces. But, no, she undid them deliberately. She knew what she would need once she stopped needing him for the night: malms and malms between them. And as she would come to him wearing the only traveler's shirt she had, and as she would need to wear it again to get away from him, she could not tear open her clothing. She undid her buttons so carefully. The stiff and measured restraint of her hands when she removed her clothes was there because it had to be.

She had come back to Aymeric, quite alive, to find that she had been presumed dead. She came back to find that she was best known in porcelain and marble and faithful hymn. Aymeric wouldn't touch her. He alleged that it wasn't allowed--profanity, blasphemy, some shite like that--but she knew it was because he was angry. Then, much later than she should have, she realized that it was also because he was hurt. Estinien had long been the rend, never the mender, and so to fix this she knew only to tear. She stood before Aymeric and ripped open the front of her own shirt, all those little snapped threads, all those buttons sent flying. She did that to prove to him, as tangibly as she could, that she no longer needed the malms and malms between them. That she needed anything but. Later, when he took her home, it was in the swaddle of his own coat--later, when he took her home, after she'd ridden him in his chair until even the hard thighs of a dragoon could not keep her upright.

How different, now. In Aymeric's singular need to make love to her, she holds the singular need to be made love to, but they aren't pressing together, into each other, for lack of time. They aren't dreading the morrow nor the vulnerable night. It's a need, but they aren't desperate. They are both of them fulfilling the other, fulfilling themselves, recursive needs and needs met. How different, now, how much Estinien can stand, how much she can bear: being held, being here, innumerable nights, immeasurable dawns. Even her thighs are disparate. She could leap. She could leap if she were called to. But she would do so carried high in the palm of Halone's own hand, for these are not the hard thighs of a dragoon. These are the soft thighs of a saint.

Granted, they're no less a vise for their softness. Estinien's thighs hug the hips of her husband like a holy adornment. Her flesh is already hot, and her legs are bare beneath her nightgown; all of her is bare beneath her nightgown. She has no need of smallclothes in the night. She has no need of what she's wearing now. And here is the new way she undoes her buttons. There's no call to pop them off again, but nor must her hands carry quick and tense precision. She can do it with leisure, the first button, the second, a pause to align herself with the rise of his cock, to roll herself against where she can feel it stiffening through his sleeping clothes. He's only wearing a thin robe in this warm weather, and it will be easy to get him out of it, but Estinien has found that it does please her to be languid. So comes the third button, and the fourth. Aymeric is grasping at her, and she is letting herself be grasped. Against all her history, she is loving the grasp: his firm hold, and her own body being firmly held. He is holding her down, weighing her down, with the promise, the threat...

A bride, a lady--but she can still loom. She leans over Aymeric, somehow even darker than the dark of night, with enough of a shadow to overwhelm the thin starlight. Her hands press against his shoulders, and as she lowers herself over his body--by the gods, she is growing--her stomach touches him before her breasts do. But some things do not change, and her trajectory is such a familiar one that it doesn't miss even with so little light: she nudges in to bite Aymeric's ear. Her teeth might seem unkind to a man who doesn't know her, but Aymeric knows her better than anyone, and here she is pressed flush against him, no intention of slipping away. To further anchor herself to him by taking hold of his ear is the dot on the i of her love letter. It keeps everything legible; it allows the rest to be read.

Into his ear, she tells him sternly,] Of course. [Stern, yes, as that undergirding of muscle, but like her thighs, her voice is softer than not.] I realize it. I count on it. Every time y... [Once this would have spooked her: she interrupts herself to gasp, sharp and hitching, when she presses just so upon his cock. She has to orient herself again, but here is the evidence of the love she's learned. She isn't flinching away from it.] Every time you come inside me, I think... of how many rooms you have got in that big fancy house.

[To be languid does not mean to draw it out forever. Sometimes she really is content to lie there beside him for bell after bell, kissing him. More often, she wants to fuck. So this is the time to right herself again, sitting up over his hips, searching his body for the tie of his robe. She finds it and undoes what barely passes for a knot. Good. They are always ready for each other, and that feels good in a way it never did to surprise him on an icy night.

With this, she can take his cock in hand--of course she doesn't need anything more than starlight to recognize it. They used to fumble in the dark. Now, stroking him feels no different from touching herself. It's just as personal, just as familiar. Her own nightgown is only half open, but touching him, feeling all of his responses--the shifting of his thighs beneath hers--is gratifying in a way she never let herself understand before. That first time they made love after she confessed that she was pregnant was when it sank into her. He sank into her for the joy of it, for the celebration, and fucked her in a way that seemed unreal. Because he was happy. It turns out that love feels so much better than she was willing to believe. And now her pussy is shameless against his thigh while she works his dick with her palm. Touching him has her overflowing with anticipation, wet enough to take him right away.]

How many, hmm? Do you know off the top of your head? How many rooms to fill...