Chapter Text
Also I wanted
to be able to love. And we all know
how that one goes,
don't we?
You’re a tragic hero. The misfortunes pile up: a group of law students stole your favorite table in the library. Your classmates who claimed they were sooo busy, sorry babes and turned down drinks are posting pictures at some fancy club uptown. There’s an insufferable man in your writing workshop who keeps using the word epistemological (incorrectly). Spring holiday is approaching and you’ve got absolutely nothing planned. And you’re in a standoff with your landlord over your backed-up sink, which he keeps insisting he’s fixed despite the evidence to the contrary. You give Baelor the sad report while you attempt to snake the drain for the fifth time.
“—which made me think he means ontological, but that’s so much more pretentious, isn’t it—ow!” An overconfident tug ends with your hand smacking against the faucet. If there’s something clogging the sink, it’s about as stubborn as you are.
“Your landlord really ought to be the one doing that, love.”
There’s a turn signal ticking on his end of the call. You catch a glimpse of the timer: 1:47:22 and counting. He never seems to tire of your aimless rambles. You’re baffled by his patience; you’d be bored of yourself by now. And yet he’s calling nearly every night you’re not together. Lets you go on and on while he drives home from a visit with one of his brothers. Go on, sweet girl, he’ll prod you when you trail off, I’m listening.
“That bastard can’t tell a sink from a shower,” you grumble. “You’d be a better plumber than he is.”
A muffled laugh. “You’d like that.”
It’s compelling, the thought of him kneeling in your kitchen. Sleeves rolled up, forearms straining as he wrestles with the J bend, maybe a gleam of sweat on his neck… you tuck that image into a shameful, needy nook of your brain.
“Hm. Maybe I would.”He’s never set foot in your shabby little flat, only given it skeptical glances while picking you up or dropping you off in his sleek SUV that looks far too out of place next to the humble sedans parked along your street. It’s one line you both leave uncrossed. You don’t invite him. He doesn’t push in. Some form of plausible deniability, maybe, though there’s no lie you could tell that would explain away your relationship with him at this point. The calls, the texts, the four out of seven nights a week you usually spend at his house… you strayed from the path of professionalism a long time ago. You wonder if something would change if he stepped foot in your drafty bedroom. If he saw the pictures tacked to your walls or the stacks of books blooming on every surface. Maybe it’s easier for him to keep himself out of your world. Easier to not get attached.
“Are you still there, sweet girl?”
“Mhm.” You tamp down your insecurity and abandon the sink for the night. “Sorry. Where was I?”
Somewhere in your monologue, you end up in bed, trying to warm up under four layers of blankets. Winter is a pigheaded creature that refuses to drift away, even if the warmer months are close enough for you to almost smell the pollen and feel an oceanic breeze through an open window. The cold against your nose and the heat under the comforter make for a slow sedative. First your eyes are closed, then the pauses between each sentence get longer, and then you’re snapping awake to a nearly-drained battery and a call time of 4:55:01 that’s still climbing higher.
On the other end, the shushing sound of his breath. You’re half-dreaming. Fading again. You let your head fall back onto the pillow, let the call go on. It’s not enough to satisfy the wanton monster inside of you, that ugly, familiar beast. But you’re too possessive of these little moments to ask for anything more.
“What the fuck?”
He nearly drops his spoon in the pasta sauce he’s been tending to. Your third glass of wine is empty (you’re on break, it’s fine) and you’re scowling at your phone. It seems as if you’re the only member of your program who isn’t tanning on an expensive boat or dining at a seaside bistro.
“They’re in Volantis,” you huff, showing him the pictures of your classmates lounging in the sunshine. “The same assholes who complain about how our stipend is so low and they can never do anything fun. And they’re in fucking Volantis. It’s… what?”
He’s grinning over the stove. “It’s good to know that some things don’t change. Every graduate program has to have a few shockingly wealthy students.”
“Yeah, but you were the one going to Volantis on holiday when you were in grad school,” you point out.
He cocks an eyebrow. “Maybe. But I never complained about the stipend.”
You didn’t need to, you want to tease him. It’s probably for the best that you were still a child when he was getting his doctorate (even if that thought makes your head spin). You can just imagine how much disdain you would’ve had for him if you were the same age, how you would’ve rolled your eyes at his neat, name-brand clothes and his crisp, unblemished textbooks. Daddy’s money, you would’ve muttered behind his back. He would’ve been off on summer holidays across the Narrow Sea, flirting with foreign girls and collecting pretentious stories about the culture and the history to share during the autumn term while you’d be waiting tables and seething with jealousy.
Well. You imagine that’s how it’d be, at least. He doesn’t talk about what he was doing when he was your age. You don’t ask.
“I’m not mad that they’ve got the money for it. Good for them, you know? I just wish they’d be honest about it,” you sigh, reaching for the bottle of red.
He hmms and returns to his cooking. Candlelight and the incandescent bulbs turn the kitchen soft and sepia. In a few weeks, the sun will be out. You’ll be able to put away your winter coats. The trees on campus will bud and bloom. You’re mad with desire for it. Of all the seasons, it’s always spring that takes the longest to set in. For now, you rub your strained eyes in his dim kitchen. The radio is playing an old song that Baelor taps his fingers to the tune of. It’s life in slow-motion, but it’s life.
“Do you still want to see Dorne? We could go. Just for a bit.”
You perk up immediately, the burst of excitement barely contained. “Yes. Gods, yes, but… aren’t your sons visiting?”
“For a few days, then they’re off to see their cousins at Summerhall and I’ve got an article to finish before the end of term.” He fixes you a plate (plenty of cheese on your pasta, he knows you so well) and sets it down for you. “I could use the change of pace.”
Can I meet them? You wish you were brave enough to ask. You overhear him on the phone with his boys sometimes. Good night. I love you. I’m proud of you, he’ll say just before he hangs up. The younger one sends letters. You’ve seen them on the kitchen table with the rest of Baelor’s mail, Matarys Targaryen, Dragonstone College printed out in messy, boyish handwriting at the top left of the envelope. You want so badly to hear all about their accomplishments, the trouble they get into, the fun they have. But he’s got a clever little smirk playing at the corners of his mouth—he knows he’s got you, he’s heard your wistful rants about how badly you wish you could just melt away in the Dornish sun—and you don’t want to ruin this. Not now.
“We don’t… I mean, it’s a bit late to get a hotel and all that.” It’s a poor attempt at being reasonable. You’re ready to spring out of your chair and pack a bag.
“We wouldn’t need to do that.” He sits down across from you and pours himself a glass of wine. “I’ve got a villa in Sunspear.”
“You’ve got a villa. In Sunspear.”
Your shock makes him chuckle. “It was my mother’s.”
Right. Like that makes it any less ridiculous. You know his family’s wealthy. For fuck’s sake, half of the campus is named Targaryen-something-or-other. There are prime ministers and ambassadors and CEOs and socialites sprouting left and right from his family tree. But he’s not gaudy about it. You could almost forget that he’s got more money than you could ever conceive of. That the wine you’re drinking casually together on a Thursday costs more than all the groceries you’ve bought for the past month. That he could probably fetch a few million for his townhouse if he decided to sell.
You’re fighting with your landlord over a sink. He has a villa in Sunspear. It baffles you how disparate your lives are, and yet how easily they seem to fit together at times.
“Okay.” You hide your grin with a mouthful of pasta. “Let’s go.”
Whatever you’d imagined about his family’s wealth, you clearly weren’t imaginative enough.
The villa sits on a hill overlooking the city, making it seem as if you could jump from the edge of the property and land right in the heart of Sunspear. It’s late when you arrive—somewhere in the ten hour drive, you’d fallen asleep to the sound of the radio and the metronome stroke of his hand against your thigh—so the lights are on and sparkling like a glass of champagne. The gate and the gardens keep any neighbors at a safe distance, but you’d seen glimpses of the other houses on the hill on the drive in. Houses would be a degrading word to call them, actually. Castles seems like a better fit.
Inside is even more striking. Golden suns spiral in tile patterns on the floor. It makes you cringe to even walk on them. Like stepping on a museum display. In the living room, a massive fresco adorns an entire wall while an ornately framed painting hangs opposite. Your heart beats faster as you get close enough to realize that it’s not a print.
Rich. It’s the only word you can think of. Not just expensive. The chocolatey mahogany dining table, the velvet cushions on the sofa, the creamy marble in the kitchen… the whole house is a dessert that’d leave your throat stinging from the sugar. A decadence you want to die in.
“Make yourself comfortable.” Baelor, the gentleman that he is, takes both of your bags off to the bedroom, leaving you to stand awestruck in the living room.
Over by the piano—because of course there’s a grand piano, shiny and proud and probably worth more money than you’ll ever make in your entire life—is a little table spotted with framed photos. You gravitate toward it, always hungry for the crumbs of his life, for snapshots of the stories he never shares with you. Most of them are old, a bit sun-stained. A couple in different flowery settings: the man, tall and white-haired, dressed in crisp suits and tailored streetwear, and the woman, dark curls billowing over her shoulders, eyes always glinting toward the camera with a dreamy shine.
Baelor finds you lost in the past, holding a picture of the dark-haired woman smiling under an orange tree with a blond toddler sleeping in her lap. “This is your mum?”
“How can you tell?”
“You’ve got her eyes.” You giggle. “Well, eye.”
You set the frame back down. Next to it, half-hidden, you notice a newer frame. A wedding: petals in the air, stained glass of the most intricate sept you’ve ever seen in the background, a man smiling at his bride, kissing their intertwined hands. Your breath catches in your throat. It’s Baelor. You know immediately. Younger, no streaks of gray in his wavy brown hair, but the same dented nose and faint lines framing his smile. Heart-stoppingly handsome.
And in her gorgeous white gown, auburn hair caressed by her veil, looking at him in the same way you do, like he hung every star in the sky—
“Is this—”
“Yes.” His voice is uncharacteristically tentative. “Jena. We honeymooned here.”
Oh.
It’s a punch to the gut. Or a kiss on the cheek. Your brain is reeling from the whiplash. Yes, you’re standing in a haunted house, but… it’s a haunted house that he honeymooned in. That he brought you to. It’s as sweet as it is morbid. A strange show of vulnerability. You’re a whirlwind of wistful anxiety, heart galloping like a wild horse at the smallest dash of hope, all while he looks like he’s waiting for a sharp slap across his stubbly cheeks.
“I’m sorry,” he says, his eyes avoiding yours. You’ve never seen him so uncertain.
“It’s alright. You should talk about her.” That doesn’t sound right, and now you’re scrambling to save face. “I mean, if you want to. I’d listen.”
And you would. You’d put a muzzle on your jealousy if it meant he’d open up. You get little scraps about his brother—six unruly children, the eldest back in rehab and the youngest a five-year-old girl going on fifteen—but never about Jena or his boys. You wish he’d tell you all about his wedding. Who got drunkest at the reception. If his brother was his best man, what the speech was like. What song they picked for their first dance. What flavor the cake was.
You’d pick vanilla with strawberry. Not that you’ve pictured it. But if time passed, if he asked, if it came to that… that’s what you’d pick.
He fiddles with his rings, a sad attempt at a smile crossing his face. “Some other time, maybe.”
It’s tranquil in the villa while the two of you drift towards bed. This sort of silence is different, a sort that makes you soften rather than tense up and lock your jaw. You’re sneaking glances at him in the mirror while you brush your teeth. You wonder if he brushed his teeth on the night of his wedding. If he tumbled into bed with his gorgeous bride and forgot, woke up the next day with that grainy un-brushed feeling in his mouth. You’re so full of mundane questions. So desperate to close the gentle distance he keeps you at. You fall asleep tucked neatly into his chest, hoping that some other time isn’t too far away.
You do try to behave.
The first two days are the most productive you’ve had in ages. A writer’s retreat that would make your classmates ache with jealousy. You flit from corner to corner of the villa, churning out pages and shifting to a new nook the second you need a change of scenery. With Baelor working away at an article in the study, you have free reign to pace around the kitchen, to occupy the entire sofa with your loose leaf scribbles, to spend an afternoon editing by the pool with only the lemon trees and the doves as your audience. All the mist and misery of a King’s Landing winter dissipates from your head in the clear, constant Dornish sun.
It’s your holiday, though. It’s warm and drowsy and so deliciously languid. In the molten haze, you forget about your drafts. You let your laptop battery die. You find yourself stretched out on a chaise in the study, a priceless first edition you’d plucked off the bookshelves utterly forgotten in your lap, watching Baelor’s thumb stroke a page of The Dornish Historical Review.
Gods, you’re greedy. You shock yourself by the depths of your own want. How fresh it feels, even after all these months.
He finds you in the garden, mid-afternoon, when you’re half-asleep and half-naked. Underneath the linen shirt you stole from him, your skin shimmers with sweat. You’re torn from the beginning of a dream by the weight of him at your side and the slip of his hand over your thigh.
“I was sleeping,” you mumble, feigning annoyance. Your legs part, a wordless invitation, and he slides his palm along the plane of your inner thigh, letting his fingertips just barely brush against the edge of your underwear.
“Were you?” He presses a kiss to your shoulder. “I’m sorry.”
“‘S okay. I forgive you.”
You’ll always forgive him when he touches you so sweetly. When he nuzzles against your neck, the stubble of his beard adding little needlepoint sparks to each kiss. His hand tucks inside your underwear, pressing against your cunt, so firm, so sure.
“Couldn’t stop thinking about this.” One finger slips between your wet folds, then another. His knuckles sink and sink, sliding across all the tender spots inside you, until the stretch makes your breath stutter. A pause. His breath against your shoulder. And then he repeats it. Muffled by the fabric of your underwear and the flesh of his hand, you can just barely hear the sloppy squelch of him drawing all the slickness from you, pulling and pushing in all the ways that make you keen and cry.
“Yeah?” You feel your body going liquid-smooth, slowly giving into the pulse that spreads from your pelvis out to your entire nervous system. “Did… was I distracting you—oh…”
“Always.” He whispers. “Everywhere. You haunt me.”
His fingers withdraw all of a sudden. You’re blinking your eyes open, about to whine and beg, when everything comes into soft clarity and you see him sucking your juices off of his fingers, his gaze fixed so intensely on your face that it’s as if he’s undoing the buttons of your soul. Your mouth goes dry.
“Fuck, let me? Please?” You’re pawing at his wrist, boneless but insistent, and his eyes go dark as he relents and slides his fingers into your mouth. You close your eyes and suck. So earthy, so tangy, laced with the bookish smell of paper on his skin. A string of saliva glistens as he pulls his hand back, tracing over your lips before he sinks the spit-coated fingers back into your cunt.
“There’s my girl,” he murmurs while you moan and arch your hips into his touch. “So good for me. Let me take care of you.”
He’s steady as he works you back toward the edge that had disappeared right in front of you. So responsive to your little twitches and gasps. You can feel his wrist all drenched and sticky, the tendons flexing, each muscle moving just enough to coax your orgasm closer. A throaty hum spills out of your mouth. It’s so hot, so vibrant, so close—
“I know. I know.” His thumb just barely grazes your clit, and that does it. “Show me.”
“Fuck!” You whimper, and you’re coming all over his hand while he kisses your dumbstruck mouth. The whole world seems blindingly brilliant. Golden as the lemons that drape like fat jewels from the branches overhead. You love his cock in ways that make you shiver from the sinfulness of it, and yet there’s something singular and magical about how the same hands that caress frail pages of old manuscripts can also make you come so hard you soak the blanket underneath you.
You take his cock later, when the sun has gone down and the white bedsheets turn pale blue in the moonlight. You let him fuck you slow and safe. You marvel at the pearlescent spill of his come when he pulls out, as he marks your body like a blank paper.
Like a bride.
Late morning, and you’re sprawled out on the terrace while he marks up his own article draft. Fierce red marks bloom across the page. Entire paragraphs get the axe. He’s more critical with his own work than with students’ work. You wonder if he knows how talented he is at breathing life into history. How his articles (and oh, you’ve read them all, you’ve endured chapters and chapters on topics you know nothing about just to absorb more of him) reveal a reverence for his profession.
Have you told him how much you like reading his work? Maybe. You try to think back on all the evenings spent curled like a cat around him while he ruminates on his latest research and come up shamefully blank.
You should say something now. Tell him to think twice before making another cruel strikethrough, tell him how you wish he’d give you a fraction of the soul that seems to spill so easily onto the page. But it’s so lovely and peaceful between the two of you. So bright. There’s hope and birdsong and citrus in the air. Why ruin it all? You tuck that thought away and return to the Top 20 Attractions in Sunspear article you’d been scrolling through.
“Did you know that Westeros’s largest lemon cake is in Sunspear?”
“Hmm?” He seems to consider that seriously. “That makes sense, I suppose. What with the Rhoynish revival and the lemon being symbolic of—”
“Was that in the assigned reading?” You quip at him, so satisfied by how that makes his chest vibrate as he chuckles. “D’you want to go?”
He flips a page, and you can see an angry red X over half of what he’d written. “I can’t say it’s on the list of things I’d like to see before I die.”
“No? Well, I’m adding it to mine.” You scroll past a list of even more absurd tourist traps until you find something more suited to his tastes. “The Museum of Dornish History is open. They’ve got an exhibit on mosaics.”
He’s quiet. Too quiet for your liking. You’ve gotten good at translating those pensive pauses.
“You don’t want to go.”
“Sweet girl,” he starts, putting his papers aside as if he’s preparing for a lecture, “it’s not that I don’t want to go—”
“We don’t have to. It’s fine.” It’s not. You just don’t want to sour this little interlude with a petty argument. You can swallow your disappointment. You’re a fucking professional at this point.
You move to get up, but he’s putting a firm hand on your thigh to keep you anchored on the sofa. “I have colleagues at the museum here. If we were in… I don’t know, Lys or Meereen, I’d take you in a heartbeat. Do you hear me?”
“I know, but…” Gods, he’s so frustratingly rational. “I wish we could go somewhere.”
It makes you sound so small, so needy. You need to hold his hand all the way down the street, not just the blocks where no one is around. You need to go out for lunch and steal chips off of his plate. You need to kiss him in public and make him blush that pretty blush of his. You need anyone who’s looking to know that he’s yours, that you’re his.
“I don’t want to make things difficult for you. I need to protect this,” he says, so gentle and a little awkward, as if he’s forcing the earnestness from somewhere raw and deep inside of him. “Will you let me? Please?”
As if you could stop him. He’s too busy protecting you to see how badly you want to be hurt. You want the difficulty. The judgment. You’re desperate for the danger and the pitfalls if it means you can be with him. Properly. Not just as a girlfriend, but… as someone. Something more than just a girl he’s fucking.
Baelor-breaks-things. You’d told him he wouldn’t break you. Now, he’s being so careful with you that you could confuse the softness for suffocation. You need to breathe.
“Okay,” you acquiesce, then tilt your head and fix him with a look. “Can I have the keys?”
So you go. Fuck it, why not? You’re on holiday, you ought to do holiday things. You visit the museum. You buy an overpriced shirt from the gift shop. You wind through sun-drenched streets while the terracotta roof tiles bake in the afternoon heat. You try your luck at a club and abandon it after a single vodka soda, too contemplative to loosen up and dance with the horribly sunburnt eighteen-year-old girls visiting from Oldtown, even though they seem well-intentioned and tell you you’re, like, sooooo pretty in the restroom.
You end up perched on a bench in a historical plaza overlooking the ocean, fingers stained by the salt and spice of street food. An old fountain at the center of the plaza bubbles and blips every time someone flicks a coin in. Seagulls pace and peck at scraps. One saunters up. Fixes its greedy eyes on you.
“Sorry, love,” you tell it, showing it the empty container. Silly thing. All want, no courage. You’d shoo it away, but it reminds you of… well, you.
Gods, it’s bright, even after nightfall. The horizon stays just slightly luminous, like the sun might change its mind and come back out at any second. Little bursts of light illuminate the plaza: camera flashes, flickering lampposts, TVs from the flats above the shops. A lone busker is still plucking at a guitar. The whole world seems so viscerally alive, as if you could dig your fingers into the ground and feel its pulse thrumming away.
It’s rare, these moments where you feel like life isn’t some secret place that you’re waiting to be taken to. It’s here. You’re in it, fully submersed, letting it illuminate all the dormant corners of your heart.
And yet, you still wish he was here. Not to clutch and kiss and flirt. You just want to have him near. To know that he hears the music, that he smells the coriander and the peppers. To know that he’s with you amidst the brightness. That he feels it too.
On the last day of your holiday, you miss the sunset. Pink melts into orange. Orange gives way to murky blue. It’s only a blur in your peripheral vision while you ride him, palms braced against his chest, forcing him to lie back and let you take what you want. You want to remember this for the rest of your life: how he praises you for chasing your own pleasure, how his hands tremble on your hips, how his eyes drift shut and he whispers your name just before he comes.
“I don’t want to go back,” you admit while you lie naked in his arms afterward. Already, you’re dreading the mud and rain of King’s Landing, the spring days that are just barely too cool to open the windows. It’s a cruel form of time travel, departing the ease of this eternal summer for a city still wrapped in winter’s grubby fingers. Back to the damp classrooms, the puddles gathering on the cobblestones, the cold seeping into your chest and leaving you bitter.
“I know, love.” Baelor cups your chin and kisses you long and slow. “We can come back. There’s a festival at midsummer. You’d like that.”
It should make you feel hopeful. Instead, all you feel is a sea of confusion churning inside you. He won’t be seen in public with you, won’t come inside your flat, won’t let you see all the scenes and the people he keeps guarded in his past, and yet he’s holding you like you’re carved from glass and talking like it’s a sure thing, the notion that the two of you will still be together in three months. You’re two strange planets caught in each other’s orbits. Sometimes near enough to collide. Sometimes so distant you could mistake him for a shooting star flickering by. You sit up, that sea inside you cresting into a surge of clarity.
“Can I ask you something? I don’t want you to answer it right now. I want you to think about it, and then you answer it when you know for sure. I need you to be sure. Do you promise?”
There’s a look on his moonlit face that you could almost call pride. “I promise.”
“Alright.” You look in his eyes, searching the depths of the brown and the glimmers of the blue. “Is this just sex? Or is this something more?”
“Sweet girl, I—” he starts, but you shake your head and nestle yourself back into the sheets.
“Think about it.”
With his arm pillowed under your head, you lay on your side and watch the citrus trees sway in the night breeze. You’ll need to wake up early tomorrow. Get in the car, drive back to King’s Landing, say goodbye to the Dornish sun. But you stay awake just to listen to the wind blowing in from the ocean. To Baelor’s breath against your neck. To a bird fretting outside the window, making its last tiny chirps before bedtime. Your little honeymoon, singing you good night.
Can I see you?
The text pops up while you’re folding laundry in front of a halfway interesting home renovation show. You have to check twice to make sure that it’s actually him. He’d dropped you off at your flat less than twenty-four hours ago, in the middle of a spring rain shower that somehow felt more frigid than a blizzard. It sends a warm prickle of electricity down your spine, the idea that he can’t make it a whole day without wanting to be near.
It’s a relief too. Already, you can feel the loneliness seeping back in. A cold draft through the unsealed cracks of a drafty window. How distant it had been in Dorne. How dormant. And now it’s carving itself back into your bones, making your whole body feel heavier.
i’ll be over in 20
Stay there. I’ll come to you.
Shit. You don’t even have time to register the thrill. By the time you’ve changed out of your pajamas, made your bed, collected the laundry, scrubbed the bathroom, and lit a candle for good measure, he’s knocking on your door.
“Sorry it’s a mess,” you wince as you let him in, nudging a random pile of books under your sofa while he’s taking off his shoes. “Tea?”
“Please.”
It’s strange seeing him sit at the kitchen table that you saved from a dumpster. Its one broken leg propped up by an anthropology textbook you haven’t touched since your first year of undergrad. The stains from hot sauce and red wine. You make him orange spice tea in a Pennytree Rugby Club mug, so faded from the dishwasher that half of the letters are just vague smudges. He doesn’t say anything about the fact that the light over your sink blinks every few minutes. Or about the odd grumble that the heater spits out. He’s just watching you.
“Thought you’d be sick of me after a week,” you try to joke while you fuss over the tea bags, although it comes out sadder than you’d intended.
“A week wasn’t enough.” And gods, he’s so genuine, those blue-brown eyes full of barren honesty. “It was too still. Back home. Without you, I don’t…”
Wherever that thought was going, it’s lost to the haze of the fluorescent lights. You turn back to the sink, washing your hands just to have a second to think. You’re never quite sure where you stand with him. Some days it’s like you can see the doors around his heart opening, the radiance spilling from inside; others, he might as well be a constellation whose light is as mysterious as it is distant.
“I have an answer for you. The beginning of one, at least,” he says slowly, analytically, once you’re sitting across from him, and it sends your heart racing. “You’ll forgive me if I make you wait for the rest? I want to get it right.”
“That’s fine.” You can see his red pen moving in your mind, annotating every word he says before he speaks. “I’ll hold you to it, though.”
“I hope you will.” There’s a ghost of a grin over his face, and then he says: “It’s something more.”
It’s as if the whole world illuminates into colors you’d never known existed. A sunrise over the grayscale inside you. All your animal instincts, always howling and whining for more, more, more go silent. Appeased. It’s the smallest concession. Not a door opening, more like a curtain drawn back. But it’s enough to make your world shift on its axis. The constellation of him suddenly readable.
His broad shoulders relax half a centimeter, tension evaporating into the night. You think there’s a watery sheen over his eyes, but it’s gone just as soon as you notice. His palm is warm from his tea when you reach out to grasp it.
“Thank you,” you whisper.
There’s an ease in the aftermath of his small, seismic confession. A layer of pressure stripped away. It’s not a fix-all. You’ll tear yourself to pieces until he finishes his soul-searching and tells you exactly what this is between the two of you, if it’s not just sex. For now, though, you’ll take anything he gives you in your fragile, fawning hands. You’ll treasure it. You’ll pray that it lasts, or that it at least has time to wind itself into the fabric of your being before one of you inevitably breaks it.
He takes your mugs when you’re finished. “Sink still giving you trouble?”
“When isn’t it?”
“I’ll take a look if you like.”
He’s no handyman. You’re fairly certain his only qualifications to fix your sink are those biceps of his that he keeps hidden under dress shirts and knit jumpers. But he’s sweet. Chivalrous. If he wants to be your knight saving you from the horrors of your ancient, constantly-breaking flat, who are you to stop him?
You quirk an eyebrow. “Yeah, go on then.”He rolls up the maroon sleeves of his jumper. His forearms are still sunkissed from the Dornish skies. The look he gives you is so knowing. You’d like that, he’d said, and yes, you absolutely do. You like all of him, so fucking much. Your golden man. Your whiplash love. Your something more.