Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

Usually, Gale puts a stop to the conversation before it reaches this point. Usually, he has a cautioning hand on Clove’s arm, and he’s using the most soothing voice he can conjure as he tries to gently re-frame everything that comes out of Lorroakan’s mouth to sound less like something that will piss Clove off. Usually, he ends up excusing them both on her behalf and tugging her away, taking her somewhere far away and quiet and unobtrusive where Clove can vent her frustrations at any volume she chooses, and maybe even make out with him afterwards, and if he’s very lucky, get a little mean about it. Usually, this goes… differently.

Except. Well.

Gale is a bit drunk. Somewhat drunk. Pretty drunk. 

Certainly drunk enough to not be on his best behavior for the work Christmas party, and yeah, sure, maybe Clove should have cut him off, but she just thought he deserved to let loose a little.

It was fine until now, anyway. He was just a little giggly, a little overly flirtatious, a little silly. Harmless. Clove thought it was fun. Cute, even. Except now he is too drunk to play his usual role, and the scene is rapidly becoming less cute.

His hand is resting on the small of her back instead of her arm, nudging her on rather than holding her back, and instead of redirecting when Lorroakan says something condescending, Gale just… giggles. It’s fortunate that Clove knows it’s not because he thinks anyone speaking to her like this is funny in and of itself. Clove knows that Gale is actually giggling because Lorroakan’s tone has turned Clove into a ticking time bomb, and Gale knows that, and Lorroakan does not. Five glasses of wine down, Gale finds amusement in a lot of things that he wouldn’t sober. It’s one of Clove’s favorite things about a drunk Gale. Usually. 

Except then Clove–who is also, in her defense, a tad drunk–inevitably snaps and tells Lorroakan to go fuck himself, and Gale just… laughs, hard, and it’s at this point that Clove finally realizes she has made a mistake. Multiple mistakes. Many mistakes.

She grabs Gale’s hand, mumbles a rushed and utterly insincere apology, and then she flees, a still giggling Gale in tow. They can’t stick around at this party, that’s for sure. They did their duty: showed up, got drunk, caused chaos. It’s time to call it quits. 

Clove clamps a hand over Gale’s mouth as she gets their coats from the coat check, muttering yet another, marginally more sincere apology to the attendant, and then as soon as they’re out the door, in the well manicured and gaudy front entrance of whatever ridiculous hotel they’re currently at, Clove lets go of Gale’s hand so she can double over, hands on her knees, and laugh so hard she nearly falls over.

“Gale, you’re going to get fucking fired.”

“Oh, hardly,” Gale says with a wave of his hand, still giggling. “It would be worth it, anyway.”

Clove straightens with a knowing look. “You enjoyed that enough to lose your job over it, did you?”

Gale is flushed from the wine already, but his cheeks darken further as he stares at her. “You have a way with words, and the bastard did have it coming. And, well, I’ve always had a fondness for you telling people off on my behalf.”

Clove smiles. “Yeah, I know. I forgot it makes you such a horny drunk, though. It’s cute.” 

“I’m not drunk.”

Clove’s grin widens. “Gale, what’s my job?” 

Gale flushes again, and doesn’t answer.

Clove crowds his space, and tilts his chin up to her with a single thumb. “What was I doing the first time I told someone off for you?

To his credit, he only squirms a little bit. “Bartending.”

“So I’d know when someone’s drunk, wouldn’t I?”

“Yes.”

Clove rewards the answer with a kiss, deep and searching, gripping the back of his head to guide him exactly where she wants him. Gale gives a high whine, melting into her, the wine making him needy and soft so immediately, and it hits Clove’s system like an electric shock, all that sudden heat landing heavy in her core. 

“Fuck,” Clove swears, nipping at his lip in frustration. “Let’s go home.” 

They barely make it a few blocks before Gale  drags Clove into an alley and tries to convince her to let him get his hand down her pants, which Clove cannot deny is a tempting offer, but it is simply too cold to be even partially undressed outside. 

Clove makes the mistake, however, of letting Gale make out with her in his attempt to convince her. It’s a sore test of her patience, every swipe of her tongue into his mouth, every whimper on his lips, the wanton way he’s groping her anywhere he can reach, so ready to drunkenly tear her clothes off in an alley and so fucking distraught about it when she won’t let him, but Clove can be stubborn, too.

“Clove,” he whines, not bitchy but close to it.

“You can survive ten minutes of walking,” Clove says fondly.

Gale kisses the smile off her face with indignance, and his fingers trace the waistband of her jeans in a gentle but insistent plea. When Clove groans softly, his hands slip up under her coat and her shirt, roving over her bare skin, gripping at her side, trying to press his advantage. 

The chill of his hands makes Clove shiver. “You won’t convince me by making me colder, lover,” she laughs breathlessly.

Gale grunts, frustrated, and buries his face in her shoulder. Clove dips her head, bringing her lips close to his ear so she can lower her voice.

“You know, there was a time when a fifteen minute walk while wine-drunk and horny was not the world ending crisis it is right now.” 

Gale’s frigid hands continue their wandering despite her complaints, palming her greedily over her bra. “Well, you have, historically, allowed me to get away with this type of thing.”

“Should I not have done that?”

“I think…” Gale trails off, tugging the cup of her bra down to brush the pad of one ice cold thumb across her nipple. Clove shivers hard. “... that you enjoy the attention too much to genuinely wish for me to stop.” 

“Gale,” Clove says with as much gravity as she can muster, wrestling his hands out from under her shirt. “I want to enjoy your attention at home, where I can enjoy it properly. So move.”

Gale does not move. Clove retreats from him a few steps, tugs on his hand, even yanks once, but he does not budge. He is swaying ever so slightly in his drunkenness, trying to appear obstinate and still looking for all the world like he’s holding back a laugh, but nevertheless he plants his unsteady feet, and lifts his chin in stubborn defiance.

“Gale.” 

Her tone makes him bite his lip. “You could always carry me.”

Clove snorts. “No.” 

“I really rather like that idea, though.” 

“Mhm. I’m sure you do.”

“You’re… very strong.”

At this very obvious and half-assed attempt at flattery, at this entire ridiculous drunken game they are playing, Clove finally has to fucking laugh. She buries her face in her hands and heaves silently until her stomach hurts. Occasionally, she can hear Gale giggling along with her. “God, you’re fucking… impossible,” she wheezes. “And you enjoy it, don’t you? You secretly love being a fucking brat, and being drunk just brings it out of you, doesn’t it?”

Clove does not miss the way Gale’s expression flickers at her wording, here. The heat in her core redoubles.

After a very long, almost agonizing few seconds, Gale reaches down, slowly, brazenly, in broad moonlight, and feigns adjusting his cock in his pants. His hand lingers far longer than necessary, a filthy little sigh on his lips as he strokes himself unsubtly, and then he smiles brilliantly at her. “I do like getting what I want.”

Clove raises a falsely unimpressed brow. “You like being a brat?”

Gale licks his lips, head tilted, deliberating. Then, right in front of all the brick and the moon and Clove’s disbelieving eyes, he sinks to his knees.

“I think you’ll find that in the right context, I can actually be quite obedient.”

It’s a miracle Clove can find the air to form words with. The whole world seems to have run out. “What context is that?”

“Bringing you pleasure.”

Clove’s chest heaves, and one hundred and one images flip through her mind–the things she could do to him, the things she could make him do to her, the ways this could go, progress, escalate. Fuck. She has felt the draw of this ever since she met him, touched herself to thoughts of it often enough to wonder if she should bring it up, and now Gale has led them here himself, persistent at every turn, just sober enough to be self-possessed, just tipsy enough to have some extra courage, and just Gale enough to do something this fucking insane.

“You want to bring me pleasure?” 

“Yes. More than anything.” 

“You want to obey me?”

A pause. “If that would bring you pleasure.”

“Then stand up.”

Clove has never struck this tone with Gale, never lowered her voice this far, never tried to sound menacing. Not once. Not since the beginning, when she used it only in his defense. This is reserved for her most testing customers. This is reserved for making people afraid– a skill Clove has always been grateful for, but now, watching Gale stand up, legs trembling, she has a whole new appreciation for it. 

“If you obey me, and you bring me pleasure, what would that make you, Gale? What do you want to be for me?”

Gale swallows audibly. “Ah. Well, I hadn’t…”

“Hadn’t thought about it? Oh, I don’t believe that,” Clove says softly.

Another swallow, but this one is to steel himself, chin lifting another defiant inch. “You could show me what I am to you. If I’m here to serve you, it seems fitting you should decide.” 

At the word serve, Clove breaks. She takes an automatic, hungry step towards him, but then pauses for one more brief moment, tilting her head at him in a silent question.

Gale nods.

Clove moves on pure instinct. She closes the distance between them quickly, spins Gale by his shoulders, and shoves him into the wall with no small amount of force. She pins both his wrists behind his back with one hand, and uses her other hand to turn his head so she can press his cheek to the cold brick.

Gale is panting hard, nearly gasping, and Clove’s head is buzzing so loud it’s difficult to fully appreciate the raggedness of it, the evidence of just how much this is doing for him. Clove isn’t all that drunk on liquor, but she is already incredibly drunk on this. 

She lets the sound of their labored breathing fill the silence for her as she collects her thoughts, trying to settle into this unfamiliar role and shake the creeping nerves. Gale has trusted her from the beginning, from before he had any good reason to, and she feels the full weight of it now; the heady and heavy rush of knowing how much he is willing to put in her hands, literally and metaphorically; the many countless hours she has spent with him, furthering his trust, earning it, earning this, and now…

“Gale,” she says finally, almost a sigh, teeth grazing the shell of his ear. 

Gale shudders, from his name alone.

… her reward.

“I think there’s only one name good enough for someone who gets on their knees in an alleyway for me when I didn’t even ask them to,” Clove murmurs, pinning his cheek with her own so she can grab a handful of his hair with her newly free hand and tug just hard enough to make him whimper. “Someone desperate enough, needy enough, pathetic enough, slutty enough. That’s what you want to be for me, Gale. My slut.”

Gale thrashes at this, because of course he does. With as limited movement as his head has access to at the moment, though, the thrashing feels much more like he simply is nuzzling her cheek, so, naturally, Clove nuzzles him back. Stoking the flames. Taunting him.

“Say it for me, Gale.” 

She tugs again on his scalp just as he opens his mouth to refuse, and he yelps, then snaps his mouth shut, like the pain might make it slip out by accident.

“My slut, my whore, my angel,” Clove coos.

This, at last, makes him moan. He opens his mouth, and whether it’s to agree or disagree doesn’t matter, because Clove twists quickly to capture his lips with hers. Gale whines into her mouth, offers his tongue willingly, but when Clove tightens her grip one last time in his hair, he gasps a sob against her lips. 

“Fuck, Clove–”

“Say it.” 

“Your slut,” he gasps, and his face flushes hot against the brick, and a shiver passes through him like the ghost of his dignity. “I want to be your slut. Make me yours, Clove, please–”

Clove releases him, hair and wrists both, spins him around, and crushes him back up against the wall so she can kiss him with as much force as she can funnel through her lips, trying to devour him enough that he’ll feel taken, making sure her little slut knows he’s earned his role. 

Gale is hard, screamingly hard as he ruts against her thigh, and he’s moaning far too loudly for the open air of an alleyway. He’d drop to his knees again if Clove wanted him to, and she does, at this point, rather want him to, cold be damned, but that’s just not what she set out to prove. The point wasn’t to make Gale call himself a slut and then shove his face in her cunt, as much as they’d both enjoy it; the point was to get Gale to fucking move.

And Clove, if she is to truly do this with him, simply cannot start by letting him get away with being a brat. 

The kiss comes to a slow, natural conclusion as they both come up for air, and Gale moves to thread his hand into Clove’s hair, but she stops him. She disentangles herself from him very gently–so gently, in fact, that Gale does not expect her to back away from him at the end. The sudden loss of her–of her warmth, her contact, her affection–makes him inhale sharply.

Clove bites back her own ragged breath, but she feels his loss just as acutely.

She holds out a hand to him. “Come.”

No yanking. No tugging. No pleading.  

Gale takes her hand, and he comes.

“You trust me?” Clove asks softly. 

“Yes.” 

“You know I’ll take care of you?”

“Beyond a doubt.” 

Clove kissed him one more time, soft, grateful.

“Then let’s go home.”

It’s not a very long walk, and despite the obvious tension, it’s peaceful. Hand in hand, not rushing because this is a moment worth savoring, flitting between pleasant reveries of what just happened and even more pleasant daydreams of what may be to come. Clove wonders if they’re imagining similar things.

They must be, because the moment the front door clicks shut behind them, Gale turns to her, arms outstretched, and Clove is already stepping towards him to drag him into a kiss. 

He doesn’t seem to notice that she is walking him backwards as they strip off their coats. In fact, Gale is so busy having Clove’s tongue down his throat that he stumbles when the backs of his heels hit the base of the stairs, and Clove’s quick reflexes are the only thing to keep him from toppling over. He is utterly unphased by it, but Clove reckons that since his distraction is her fault, he has earned the right to the favor he asked her for earlier. 

“Gale,” she murmurs. “Hold on to me.”

Gale wraps his arms around her neck obediently through his obvious rising confusion, and Clove leans down to scoop him up in one easy motion, one arm under his legs, the other supporting his back.

“Oh, goodness!” Gale exclaims.

Clove smiles, and shakes her head. Goodness. “You asked to be carried,” she reminds him.

“I know. You just… caught me off guard,” Gale says, trying his best to act unconcerned, but he tenses in her arms the moment she starts up the stairs. A bad liar, as usual.

“Do you think I’m going to drop you, lover?” Clove murmurs into his ear. 

Gale shakes his head, but he squeaks when Clove adjusts him in her arms, giving himself away again.

Clove reaches the top of the stairs, and stops. “You really think I would let you fall?” she asks softly.

“No,” he whispers. 

Clove tsks at him quietly as she walks into the bedroom, flicks the light on, and deposits him carefully on the edge of the bed. She squats between his knees, hands resting lightly on the tops of his thighs. “I thought you trusted me.”

“I do.” 

“I thought I took good care of you.”

Gale makes a pained sound. “You do.”

Clove eyes him cautiously, growing more somber. “This is alright, still?”

“Yes. Very much so. I didn’t… I truly didn’t think you would drop me. I just got a little dizzy, is all.” 

Something achingly tender unfurls in Clove’s chest at his earnestness, and her eyes go misty. “Yeah. I believe you, baby. Thank you.”

“You know, you…” 

Gale trails off, suddenly bashful. Clove tilts her head. 

“This may just be the wine talking, but I think knowing you wouldn’t drop me is the reason I want… this with you. I know that, practically speaking, I’m giving up control–or giving it away, rather–but it feels a lot less like giving anything up, and more like… receiving something. Safety, perhaps. Security in the simple knowledge that you would not let bad things happen to me. I know that, no matter what we do or what games we play, you will make it good. Even if the things we do scare me, I am… willing to be nervous, so long as it’s with you. You won’t let it be bad, Clove, and I am… I am so grateful for you. For that. And this.” 

Clove has to sink her forehead down onto his thigh for a moment. “Christ, Gale.” 

“Was it the wine?” he whispers. 

This gets a laugh out of her, even though she’s about two seconds from tears and so fucking floored she almost doesn’t know how to continue. 

“No. That wasn’t the wine. That was just you, lover.” Clove takes a few measured breaths,  lets a few tears leak out, trying to stabilize. 

It’s a different kind of trust, is all. There’s the trust required to put his body in her hands, to believe she will keep the bad things from him, know she will take care of him, but there’s a deeper trust there, too–hard earned and carefully protected–that gives her these impromptu speeches, these little glimpses into Gale’s soul, his thoughts, his heart. He has told her before that Mystra was not one for verbal affection, and Clove cannot conceive of missing out on how Gale loves so hard, in all ways, but particularly with his words. For all her blunt honesty, Clove will never match him. 

Finally, Clove looks up at him, gathering his hands in hers. “Thank you. I’m fucking honored.”

Gale leans down to meet her for a kiss, letting the overwhelm melt to familiar comfort, and they both sigh. 

“Speaking of not letting bad things happen to you, you should pick a safe word.”

It takes him a few seconds. “Strawberry.” 

Clove nods. “Strawberry. That’s good.”

A silence stretches out between them. Clove strokes the top of his thigh thoughtfully. 

“Well, what do you want to do?” Gale asks finally. 

Clove grins. “I don’t think I’ve ever heard you ask that question in this context before.” 

“I’m not sure we’ve ever been in this context before.” 

“Well, I meant, like, in bed, but yeah, I guess you’re right.”

There’s another brief pause.

“I know what I want,” Gale offers, sensing her own idea is not immediately forthcoming.

Ever so helpful, her Gale is. Clove quirks a brow at him. “Do you?”

“I’d like to be on my knees again.”

Clove starts working on his pants. “Mhm. Doing what?” she asks disinterestedly. 

“Anything you want.” 

She nudges his hips up so she can slide his pants off. “What if I wanted you to do nothing?” 

“Well, that…” Gale swallows. “That would be fine.” 

Such a terrible fucking liar. 

“Oh, that’s good,” Clove purrs. “Because I want you to do nothing, my needy little slut. I want you to sit, just like you are, and I want you to close your eyes, and relax, and if you’re very patient and very good, maybe you can come down my throat when I’ve had my fill of being on my knees for you.” 

There’s nothing covering Gale’s cock anymore; nothing concealing the way it reacts to Clove’s words. Not that her having gotten his cock’s attention so thoroughly would have been a secret anyway, because Gale whimpers, out loud, like a slut, but half-mast to fully hard in the space of one sentence is still a nice touch.

“Can I–can I touch you?” 

“Once your eyes are closed. Are you going to be able to keep your eyes closed, or do I need to blindfold you?”

Gale gives this a long moment of adorably serious consideration, then just… nods.

“... Gale? Yes to which one?” 

“Oh! Blindfold me.”

They both dissolve into giggles at this. Gale is pink as anything when Clove returns to him with a soft t-shirt that she ties around his head, and his giggles are still in the process of petering out as she tugs his shirt over his head, undresses herself, and runs one more secret errand before sinking to her knees in front of him again. 

“Lover,” she says with palpable affection.

“Slut,” he corrects swiftly. 

Clove rolls her eyes. “Are you going to touch me or not?” 

Gale reaches out blindly, tentatively, and pokes her cheek first before finding his way into her hair. He holds it back from her face, scratches gently at her scalp, and sighs. 

Clove runs her hands up the insides of his thighs with a sigh of her own. She takes the opportunity, while Gale is quiet and content, to touch him a lot, covering every inch of particularly intimate skin that is not his cock, multiple times over. All the way from his waist to his toes, the expanse of his chest, the soft swell of his belly. She kisses his hips, his thighs, the hair trailing down from his navel. She caresses his balls with a slow, gentle massage. She brushes his taint with her index finger, once by ‘accident’, twice on purpose, and on the third time, Gale squirms. 

“Do you like that?” she murmurs. 

“I want your mouth.”

“That’s not an answer.”

“Clove.” He says it like a warning, but not a very convincing one. 

“Answer me, and you can have my mouth.” 

“Yes,” he squeaks. 

Clove sucks just the head of his cock into her mouth, swirling her tongue lazily, and eases off with her finger. He liked it, though, and it doesn’t take long for Gale to forget his worries. The hands in her hair tighten incrementally as she works her way down his shaft, and Gale moans like the spoiled, carefree slut he is, and she hasn’t worked him up so much that he’s close to coming yet, anyway. She has time. They have time. 

All the time in the world, really. The lube sitting by Clove’s knee is just her being impatient. 

It’s just that they’ve never done it before, and Clove has thought about it for fucking ever, and if there’s one thing she wants out of this new role, it’s this. She wants to take Gale apart this way. She wants to feel him, finger him, fuck him.

This final thought makes her groan around his cock, just as her nose presses into his hair, and Gale’s hips jerk. Clove makes no move to hold him down. Instead, her one, insistent finger returns in one firm stroke, and this time, Gale is too far gone to pretend he doesn’t like it. He moans, and uses his grip on her hair to tug her urgently back down onto him. Clove allows it, hums happily, and then her finger slips lower. 

All it takes is the lightest amount of pressure, and Gale’s cock pulses once in her mouth at the same time he gasps her name, and then they both freeze. Gale is breathing hard, cheeks flushed dark and appealing, clinging to her hair like his life depends on it, but… he doesn’t try to escape her finger.

Clove pulls off of him slowly. “Gale.”

“Fuck, that’s, I–”

“Have you ever put anything up your ass?”

He shakes his head.

“Not even a finger?”

“No.”

“I want to try it with you.” 

“I’m scared,” he admits in a small voice, miserably, as if it’s a crime worthy of punishment. All his bravery tonight, and Gale would probably still call himself a coward for being nervous about Clove fingering him.

“Be scared with me, then,” Clove murmurs. “I’ve never done this either, but we’d figure it out together. Just one finger, and I won’t go very far. I know you could take it, my angel, and I bet you’d make such pretty noises for me.”

Gale exhales slowly like he’s trying to calm himself down, but his body stays rigid. He nods once, tiny and stiff. Not the answer Clove was hoping for. 

She removes her finger, brings her hand up to instead knead once more at his balls, kisses the tip of his cock comfortingly, and Gale’s body finally sags with what she suspects is both relief and disappointment. 

“Have you ever thought about it?” she asks softly. 

“Yes.”

“Tell me,” she mutters before swallowing him down again. 

It takes a few fumbled starts and a lot of cursing, but this, Gale can find it in himself to do, because no matter the situation, Gale can find his words when he needs them. “I’ve thought about– fuck!– what you must feel when I fuck you, the way it must feel to be… pressed into, invaded. ”

Clove growls as her cunt throbs. She takes him deep enough to make her eyes water, and it’s all the encouragement he needs.

“I’ve wanted to try it, on my own, just with my finger but I–I’m always too afraid. But I fantasize about it, sometimes. And in my head, it’s always you, Clove. You spreading me open, or teasing me, or–or fucking me.”

Clove comes off of him with a gasp, and the heat and ferocity in her own voice takes her breath away. “Gale, take the blindfold off. Look at me.”

He obeys, and she watches as his eyes sweep from his glistening cock to her wet lips to the tears in her eyes and, finally, to the bottle of lube tucked against her knee. His eyes are plastered wide with increasing awe.

“I’d do that for you,” Clove says, growing ever more urgent. “I’d make it good for you. That’s what you told me, isn’t it? That I make things nice, even when you’re scared?”

Gale stares at her for another long moment, then, once more, he exhales slowly. “One finger?”

“One.”

“Alright. Do it.” 

Clove raises an eyebrow at him.

“Please,” he amends.

“Good boy,” she purrs, and Gale tries to huff hard enough to conceal his blush while she lubes up her finger. “Do you want to lay down?” she asks softly. 

“No.”

“Scoot closer to the edge of the bed, then.”

Gale obeys, and then he relinquishes the hold on her hair so he can lean back on his hands. Clove hums appreciatively, lips sealed once more around his cock. She trusts him to handle his nerves, but she also figures relying on the blowjob as a distraction can’t hurt, and she knows how to get Gale absorbed in a blowjob very quickly by now.

Only a few minutes of steady work, and a flush is creeping across Gale’s chest and up his neck, and he throws his head back with a groan she knows is frustration, because she has not followed through yet. That’s alright. She’ll take impatience over fear. For now. 

Despite his eagerness, when Clove presses her finger to him again, Gale jumps . 

“Cold, sorry!” he gasps, and Clove hums in what she hopes is an apologetic way, rubbing her finger in little circles around his hole to warm the lube up.

And oh, what a delicious little slut it turns him into. His hips seem torn between thrusting up into her mouth and down onto her finger, and his breath is barely making it past his throat, anticipation pulling him taut as a piano string.

“Fuck, please, Clove, I want it, I need it–”

Clove pushes, very tentatively, and Gale snaps his hips down, and then her finger is inside him to the first joint.

Clove would apologize, but her mouth is full, and besides, Gale is so fucking hot– inside, outside, his voice, his precum, his sweat, his existence, his reaction.

“Fuck!” he shouts as his right elbow gives out on him and he is forced to heave himself up onto his left arm alone, gripping the sheets with white knuckles, hips still stalled out in their indecision, chest heaving.

No, Clove is far too smug to apologize, too busy growing very quickly fond of the way he feels, the tightness of him, the heat, and then she moves her finger, pulls it out just the tiniest bit, and Gale sucks in a breath, goes stiff, and they both freeze. 

Clove locks eyes with him, cock still halfway in her mouth. “Mm?” 

“It’s–it’s alright, just strange. Keep moving, do it again. I’ll get–” Gale breaks off on a shaky breath as she pumps her finger slowly, still only to the first joint. “I’ll get used to it,” he sighs. “It’s already getting better. It’s… god, it’s good.” 

If Clove could smile, she would, but she gets back to work instead, which he probably appreciates more. Gale’s hips are confused for only a few more minutes, and then he finds a gentle rhythm with her, rising to meet her mouth and sinking to meet her finger. Eventually, he holds himself on two hands again, thrusting with a little more intent, moaning with every single one, and Clove loves giving him head but she’d do fucking anything to be able to talk at the same time.

She wants to tell him how beautiful he is, and how beautiful he sounds. She wants to tell him he’s the most perfect little whore she could ask for, all hers for the taking, all hers forever. She wants to tell him how many times she’s imagined this, too; how long she’s wanted it; how she’ll try her fucking heart out to make it good. She wants to tell him she’s proud of him, and she thinks he’s brave. She wants to tell him he’s allowed to come, if he wants to, but then again, maybe he already knows. 

“Clove, more,” comes his desperate, raspy plea, hips falling out of synchronicity with her because he started rushing. Clove hums her disapproval, and he collects himself, finds their pacing again, then clarifies. “I want it deeper. I want more of your finger. Please. Please, Clove, fuck. More.”

Clove feels her own nerves twinge in her gut, but he trusts her, and he wants this, and she can be brave for him too, so she pushes. She expects Gale to tell her when to stop pushing, but he doesn’t. He just moans, long and low and broken, and his cock pulses insistently inside her mouth, and when she starts fucking him again, this time to the second joint, his legs begin to shake.

Gale forces his shaky legs into motion in an effort to scoot closer to her, though, trying to hang his ass over the edge of the bed to give her better leverage, but then something in the change of angle does something, and Gale’s body spasms, his back arches, and he comes down her throat with no warning at all, not even a shout, in total silence. 

That’s certainly a first. 

Clove is lucky for her quick reflexes or she’d be choking on him, and he seems to come forever. Every instinct in her wants to moan as she swallows him down, again and again, but she finds herself somewhat reluctant to break the silence.

When his cock has finally given its last throb, and Clove has released him from her mouth and slipped her finger slowly and carefully out of him, Gale speaks again. 

Or tries to.

“Clove, that was–”  

“Lay down.” 

Gale’s back hits the mattress so hard it expels a little huff from his lungs, and then he scrambles up the mattress with all the speed his trembling limbs can muster as Clove climbs onto the bed over him. 

“Me first,” she murmurs as she straddles his head, and Gale hums with near delirious pleasure as she sinks down onto his face. 

Then, finally, Clove tells him. She tells him everything she wanted to say but couldn’t, every thought she has about the experience they just shared, all the praise she had stored up in her chest, the admonishments she can now deliver with a hint more force.

Gale is quiet, listening to her obediently, until her first orgasm rolls over her in one brutal wave and Clove is decidedly not silent about it, and then he grips her thighs to keep her firmly in place, and groans into her cunt at a volume that makes her shiver as she is still trying to reorient herself.

If Clove had to guess, she would say she is not performing in this role quite like Gale intended her to. She’s been highly distractible and a little bit all over the place, and she’ll have time to work out how to do this for him properly, but for right now, all she wants is to enjoy him. Her Gale. Her slut. Her lover. Giving all of himself to her, in new and inventive ways, every day, over and over.

Clove is quieter as she hunts for her second, much more focused on the slow roll of her hips and his eager tongue and her tender reveries, and eventually Gale’s moans fade to a soft, constant hum.

When Clove feels her orgasm on the horizon, she reaches down and strokes the top of his head. 

“You’ve been perfect, lover.” 

Gale whines as his nails bite into her thighs, and Clove comes for him again, legs shaking so hard she topples forward before it’s over.

Gale eases her off of him, and as soon as Clove hits the mattress he seems to want nothing more than to climb inside her skin, which Clove gets, but she drags herself out of bed anyway, cleans them both up as quick as she can before crawling back into Gale’s open arms. It takes a few tries to settle on a position they’re both happy cuddling in. They land with Gale’s head on Clove’s chest, legs intertwined with hers, hand resting on her stomach. He’s still breathing pretty hard. 

Again, Clove gets it. 

“That was intense.” 

Gale nods emphatically. 

“You surprised me,” Clove admits quietly. “In the alley.”

“I know. I’m sorry if it was startling. I found this to be a difficult thing to bring up… subtly.”

“I think maybe you’re just not a very subtle person.” 

He pauses. “You like that about me,” he notes finally, with a hint of pride. Nailing another quiz he studied for. 

Clove laughs. “Yeah. I do. It worked, didn’t it?” 

“Yes. You were wonderful.”

“Eh. I’ll get better.” 

Gale cranes his neck to peer up at her, brow furrowed. “You’re an awfully harsh critic.”

“No, I’m just honest. I think I could be good at it. This is just… less intuitive to me than sex usually is. This feels like performance, and sex just feels like … I don’t know. Doing what feels good. Plus, when you mess up during sex it’s funny, but if I fuck this up, I’ll feel, like, fucking evil or something probably.”

“Wouldn’t the knowledge that you are not, in fact, evil mitigate that feeling somewhat? I certainly would not have asked if I harboured any suspicion that you were evil.”

Clove shrugs. “Maybe. I’m just saying this feels like higher stakes, so it feels important to be good at it, and tonight… I don’t know, I’ve never done this before.” 

“Me neither.”

“Yeah, but you’re a drama queen by nature.” 

Gale rolls his eyes. “I think it is intuitive, Clove. I think you’re already good at it, but if it helps at all, I am very much interested in taking this… slowly. I have nerves of my own to contend with.”

Clove lets out a shaky breath, and nods. “Okay. Slow.” 

A long silence. “I do hope we’ll try to recreate whatever happened with your finger at the end there relatively soon, though.”

Clove laughs, rolls him off her and onto his other side, following him so she can crush him back to her chest. “Yeah. Yeah, we can do that.”

Chapter Text

It has taken her over three decades to do it, but at this point Clove has developed a decently solid understanding of the things in this life she is simply incapable of tolerating well. 

What are the quirks of personality if not cause and effect, anyway?

A parent who both refused to teach her anything and mocked her ignorance has gifted her a life long, self conscious, often vitriolic defensiveness about her own intelligence. 

A distinctly unchildlike lack of hobbies until she was well into her twenties morphed into a devastating mortification that preempts even so much as admitting she tries to improve at a goddamn skill every once in a while. 

And now, at thirty six, Clove is learning a new one.

Being ghosted for eight months has left her feeling absurdly, unfairly, miserably abandoned if Gale does not keep in touch when he’s out of town.

All her pride in her ability to use her fucking words, gone the moment Gale leaves a text unanswered just a bit too long.

Humiliating.

Oh, right. 

A lifetime of fighting the never ending current of shame, and a primal rage that swells in her like a tsunami at the slightest humiliation.

Oh yes, Clove is angry.

It’s not like it’s just been a reply arriving a few hours late. It’s been four days of practically nothing. One text a day, two if she’s lucky. A few words each. No phone calls. Maybe it would all feel less agonizing if Clove hadn’t felt the sting of Gale’s absence for a month before he even got on a plane.

She did use her words, while he was still here. She said hey, you’re spending a lot of time working and I miss you, and, you get really absorbed in what you’re doing sometimes and I feel like you forget about my entire existence, and, fucking pay attention to me right now or I swear to god–

Gale listened every time, of course. He apologized, sweet and sincere and convincing as ever, allowed her to drag him away for an hour or two, and then… back to work. Forgotten again. Always a bandaid, a temporary reprieve, decreasing in frequency the more tired Clove became of bringing it up, right up until he fucking left, and Clove fell apart.

So now she is well and truly angry, and it only makes her more furious to know that expressing it would feel nothing short of ridiculous. 

I miss you so much that I want to fucking scream at you.

Although really, even in her bitterest moments, she knows that all she really means to say is much more painful, and far too vulnerable.

Please do not let me disappear from your life again.

Clove is too deep in her own self pity for that now, though. For any communication at all, really. Four days seething, six bowls cashed, three nights crying herself to sleep. She is achingly aware at every moment, too, that none of her anger is really fair to Gale at all, none of it is truly justified, and the awareness only serves to make her spiral further. Her anger with herself and her anger with Gale have become so intertwined as to appear one and the same, stemming from the same place, indivisible to the end of every line of thought.

Tonight is the most miserable she’s felt yet, so when Gale’s name lights up her phone at quarter to one, mid-fourth-going-to-sleep-cry, she nearly throws it across the room.

Are you awake, my love? 

Five minutes of warring with herself results only in the sulkiest response she can think of. 

yes. 

She already hates herself for being unable to pass up the opportunity for attention when she’s obviously in no mood to chat, and then Gale calls her, and her stomach sinks.

“Hey.” She sounds even more hoarse than she feared. 

“Oh no! Did I wake you? I’m sorry.”

“No. I was awake.” A short response, but her voice cracks anyway.

“My heart, are you crying?”

Wasn’t this what she wanted? To be texted? Called? To hear his voice and have it be full of warmth and concern and affection? Wasn’t this the supposed solution to her misery, at one point in time?

Not anymore. 

“No. I’m fine.”

There’s a long pause. “Clove,” he says finally, softly, devoid of frustration. “I only want to help.”

“Don’t worry about it. You’re too busy to help.” 

The phone finally crackles with his sigh, and Clove regrets it, but not enough to take it back. 

“I have apologized for my absence as best I know how, and I was not under the impression you cared much for my communications anyway, given your responses since I’ve been away.”

This makes Clove’s blood flash hot, partially due to the fact that she knows there is truth to it; she has not sent particularly wordy texts herself. 

He still ditched her first, though.

“Okay. Fine.”

Another sigh, finally laced with frustration. “Do you want me to let you go, then?”

Clove sniffles. No. “I just want to go to sleep.” 

“I’ll let you sleep, then. Goodnight.”

“Bye.”

Tears of regret are far less effective for crying herself to sleep. It takes hours, until the very early hours of the morning, when she very nearly breaks down and texts him an apology, but she doesn’t. She falls asleep sniffling quietly and thinking about the wisdom of drinking some water after all this crying, then wakes late with a throbbing headache and a dry mouth and the urge to get stoned as soon as she opens her eyes, which she gives into. It’s her day off, anyway. She can spend it rotting in bed if she so chooses. Nobody is around to witness it besides Tara, and at least her judgements aren’t verbal.

Today, there are no texts at all. Clove types out seven variations of the same apology, but deletes them all, seething in the knowledge that Gale is far too busy to be doing something as unproductive as retyping out texts that go unsent, so when her phone rings around dinner time, there’s no one she expects it to be less than Gale. She almost fails, in her shock, to pick it up before it rings out.

“Hello?”

“Hello, my love. How are you?” 

Clove stalls out for a second. He sounds a tiny bit cautious, sure, but warm and affectionate as ever, almost as if they didn’t get into half of a fight yesterday.

“I’m, um, okay. I think. I’m kind of high. You?”

“I’m alright. I had plans tonight, but I, er, excused myself.”

“Oh. You… didn’t have to do that.” 

“I know. I wanted to. I miss you very dearly, Clove. You know that, don’t you? I missed you while I was locked in my study preparing for this conference, and I’ve thought of you every minute I’ve been gone. I know I’m intense about my work at times, but I always come back to you, and… I hoped you understood it never meant I cared any less for you. I tried to make that clear, when you brought it up before. I’m sorry if I was not as reassuring as I could have been.” 

“Yeah, no, I don’t think that’s…” Clove is forced to pause for a ragged breath and sit up in bed, trying to keep the tears at bay for at least a few sentences. “I don’t think it’s on you. I think I’m just throwing a tantrum over nothing.”

“I struggle to believe that. You rarely throw tantrums. It seems requisite that they would have a good reason. I just want to know how to help.”

The only reply Clove manages to produce is a hoarse sob, and she hears the distressed sound that escapes Gale’s throat through the phone.

“Oh, Clove. I’m so sorry. I could come home early, if I–if I can find a flight,” Gale offers, frantic and audibly close to tears himself.

“No. Fuck. Don’t do that.” 

Gale lets her cry in silence, then, finally as lost for words as she is. 

“I’m sorry,” he repeats softly, as the sobs begin to ebb. 

“Stop being sorry. You didn’t do anything wrong.”

“I upset you.”

“Yeah. It’s still not on you.”

“I don’t understand.”

Clove sets her jaw, steeling herself for the inevitable. It has to come out. There’s no way around it. “Gale, one time you left town and I didn’t hear from you for eight months, and as much as I hate to admit it because I know you had your reasons, I think it may have fucked me up a little bit.”

She can hear how uneven his breathing is on the other end of the line. “Oh,” he says, voice small. 

“And it’s not because I’m like, harboring some secret grudge about it. I forgave you. I meant it. I haven’t been mad about it in a really long time, but when you’re far away and hard to get a hold of, I just feel… left behind again. I feel like I’m not in your life anymore, and it’s stupid, and I know it’s stupid, but I don’t know what to do about it. I don’t know if there’s anything either of us can do about it. I think I just need to learn how to put a better cap on it.”

“No, don’t hide it from me,” Gale says quickly. “Please don’t do that. I want to know. I deserve to know. I can hardly believe it didn’t occur to me before. It seems such an obvious thing.”

“It’s not obvious. It’s stupid. You should be able to take a trip and not have to ditch plans to talk to me, Gale. I don’t want to be a fucking nuisance.”

“You feel this way because of me, my heart. I owe you my best effort to make this less painful.”

“It’s not your fault,” she whispers.

“It is, and that’s alright. It can be my fault, Clove. You’re generous to pardon me, but you don’t need to.”

“I didn’t want this to be a big deal,” she sobs, dissolving into tears once again. “I just wanted to ignore it. You would have been home in a few days anyway, and everything would have been fine. I shouldn’t even feel like this, and I definitely didn’t need to cause a fucking scene, and stress you out, and–”

“You are being most unkind to the love of my life right now.”

“I know, I’m just–I’m just tired,” she hiccups, deflating. “This week has been so… so fucking miserable.”

“I know,” he says, voice thin, pained. “I believe it, however much I wish it wasn’t the case. I am yours, though, Clove. Distance has never changed that, not for those eight months and certainly not now. I’m grateful that I can tell you that now, at the very least. I can also offer you my company for the night, limited though it is, if you would like it. I don’t need to leave the hotel room again. I could order room service, and we could be on the phone together until we fall asleep.”

Clove snorts as she puts him on speaker and tosses the phone on the mattress, leaning over to grab the box of tissues from the nightstand. “You’re too fucking nice. Have your snobby math friends teach you about being a little more of an asshole.”

“I’m assuming that’s a yes?” 

“Yeah,” she croaks, pausing to blow her nose aggressively. “That would help.” 

“Excellent. Have you eaten? I’ll order you food. You’re always in the mood for Thai, aren’t you? It shouldn’t take too long; I’ll try to order my food to arrive at the same time.”

“Glad to know my opinions on any of this are worth a damn,” Clove mutters, throwing herself back down on the mattress with huff. 

“Oh, you’re grateful for it. You could spend the time and energy I’m saving you cleaning off all the used tissues I strongly suspect you’ve been collecting on our bed.” 

“God, I want to hang up on you already.”

“You’d never dream of it.”

So this is Clove’s night now, and whatever kind of day she was having prior to this is left in the dust, irrelevant and forgotten, seamlessly replaced by a long distance dinner date with Gale. The night she intended to have is still intact, more or less; she is stoned and in bed. Now it’s just sweeter on the tongue, and less tiresome for the soul. 

Gale is hesitant to broach the topic of the conference at first, but with the smallest nudge from Clove, the floodgates open. She has no genuinely bitter feelings about Gale’s enthusiasm for his work, especially not when she is privileged enough to absorb the full warmth of that enthusiasm. A gentle ‘not a math person, lover’ is enough to steer him out of anything too technical for her to understand, and mostly, really, all he wants to do is tell her stories, and Clove could spend an eternity listening to Gale tell her stories.

The Thai food arrives, and then it’s gone, and the empty cartons are definitely still sitting on the bed as Clove puffs on the bowl, and if Gale has any opinions–either on the trash that she knows he can sense from a distance has not been properly disposed of, or on her smoking inside, which is most decidedly against the rules–he is suddenly in the mood to keep those opinions to himself.

Clove is laying on her back again, phone on speaker and sitting on her chest, arms folded behind her head.

“No idea, dude. Sounds like a really wack whiskey sour or something. We can try to recreate it some time. Or actually, you should ask Karlach to figure it out. She’s better at that shit than I am.”

“Oh, I’ll have forgotten what it tasted like entirely by the end of the week.”

“You could go back and ask the bartender?”

“I’m not sure I’d recognize the bartender if they were standing in front of me right now.”

“Oh my god. You got drunk.” 

“Only a bit. I mostly just wasn’t paying much attention.”

“Wait, so you were drunk when you called me last night?”

“I’d say I was tipsy at best.”

“Uh huh, sure. Why call me in the middle of the night, then? Were you horny or something?”

“No, of course not!” Gale retorts. Overly defensive. A dead giveaway. 

Clove smiles, and takes the phone off speaker, holding it to her ear again. “That’s what got you to finally pick up your phone, isn’t it? You wanted me to get you off.”

“You’re painting me as a villain.”

“Am I? What’s wrong with calling your girlfriend when you’re horny?”

“The fact that I did not call her sooner, and for less debauched purposes.” 

“That’s okay. I know my little slut just can’t help himself.” 

Clove would give anything to have a front row seat to Gale’s blush right now, to the rising tent in his pants, to his squirming. This is a bold leap to take, shifting the tone so drastically like this, but she’s relatively confident it’ll pay off. And sure enough–

“I couldn’t stop thinking about you,” he admits, voice shaking. “It was keeping me awake.”

“Were you touching yourself?” 

“Well, yes, a bit, but I also, er…”

“You what?”

It takes at least ten seconds for him to gather the courage. “I bought lube on my way back to the hotel, because I’d been rather distracted all night, and I thought if I did call you, I’d… have it.” 

“You’d have it,” Clove repeats, warmth effusing through her body all the way to the tips of her fingers. She loves him so fucking much, this man confessing to her his mortal sin of buying some lube.

“Yes. I think that may have been why I couldn’t sleep,” he admits, and Clove laughs, and he giggles along with her, because he knows there’s no judgement in it. 

“I like that you thought to be ready for me if I decided I wanted you,” Clove says, cradling the phone tenderly like he’s really in there, like he’ll feel it. “That was sweet of you, my angel.”

Gale makes a noise somewhere between a contented hum and a whine, and Clove has to keep from immediately reaching down to touch herself. 

“I, ah, hope that proves my point. That I’ve been thinking of you. Even if not all the thoughts have been… wholesome. You’ve been there, regardless.”

“Yeah. Hmm.” 

There’s nothing but the sound of Gale’s slightly harsh breathing for a minute. 

“Clove?”

“Shh. I’m thinking.”

He lasts exactly as long as she expected him to, which is around seven seconds. “About what?”

Clove clicks her tongue, and Gale huffs, but falls silent again.

“Have you fingered yourself, since I started doing it to you?” 

“No, I–”

“Is that why you were so distracted last night at the bar? Is that what you couldn’t stop thinking about?”

“No.”

The answer is immediate and so obviously honest, and Clove’s breath catches in her chest.

“No?”

“That’s not what I was thinking about.”

Something in the tone of this confession makes Clove shiver. “Hold on.”

She throws the phone on the bed, then quickly picks it back up. “Don’t touch yourself,” she adds sternly, and just catches Gale’s whine before she throws the phone back down and leans over to fumble through the nightstand for a vibrator–her favorite, a simple little black wand–and some lube. She adds her discarded pants and underwear to the growing pile of trash on the bed, and wipes the lube she gets on her finger onto one of the napkins from her Thai food, and smiles to herself a little bit. Classy. 

She picks the phone back up. “Hi.” 

“Hello.” Gale sounds… strained.

Clove turns the vibrator on, and she knows he hears it, because his breathing ceases for a moment. “Tell me what you were thinking about,” she purrs, sinking down into the mattress as the wand settles into her preferred spot for it.

“I am, uh, before, can I–”

“No. Tell me.”

“Fuck, it’s–Clove, please.”  

“At a bar with a bunch of buttoned up math people you respect, your fancy fuckin’ colleagues, and you were so distracted all night long that you had to buy lube and call me? You’ve made the pot too sweet, lover. I need to know.”

She expects Gale to fight her more, but he relents. “The bar–it reminded me of you, and I missed you, and I think I was–fuck, it sounds bad now–hoping you missed me too. I was thinking about if you were here, if you had come with maybe, or even just showed up unexpectedly, and… I was imagining the lengths you might go to. To drag me away. To take me. If you really needed me, and I’d made myself unavailable for too long.”

Gale says the latter half of this like it’s the dirtiest secret he’s ever admitted to. Which… it might be. Clove heavily suspects it’s not the dirtiest secret he has, though, and she cannot fucking wait to discover more of his secrets, now that they’re exploring a realm in which Gale feels safe expressing them.

They said from the start they would do this slowly, and it has been slow. It’s been gentle, and unrushed, and lovely. Clove has tied him up a couple times. Gale has done a lot of begging.  He has a few new names, and Clove has a few new tricks. They were content with the low simmer for a few months, but now Gale, ever the proposer of grand schemes, is suggesting they turn it up a notch. Several notches. 

Maybe a little bit of distance isn’t such a bad thing.

After all, here Clove was, feeling abandoned and forgotten about, while Gale sat in a bar and fantasized about her dragging him out of it. He imagined a reality in which it was entirely out of his control how he spent his time; a world where he was unavailable, but for her, his availability didn’t matter, and now here he is telling her about it.

Clove’s fucking lucky, is what she is, to have Gale, to have this, to partake in this language they share through sex, communicating with each other through a medium they’ve both instinctually understood each other through since that very first night. Clove is lucky, and flattered, and so unbelievably turned on. 

So turned on, in fact, that between the unexpected intensity of Gale’s words and the intensity of the vibrator, she comes before she can form a response. She doesn’t know what comes out of her mouth as the orgasm crashes into her out of nowhere, but she knows he heard her, because she hears his quiet, reverent oh my god on the other side of it.

Clove closes her eyes, and clicks the vibrator off. “Gale.” 

“Yes?”

“Where’s that lube you bought?”

“In my hand.”

“Mm. Eager.”

“Prepared.”

“Are you wearing pants?”

“No.”

“Eager.”

Gale does not reply. Clove pictures his fists, balled up tight and white knuckled against his thighs. 

“Where am I? Are you holding the phone?” 

“Yes, but I can put you on–”

“No. No speaker phone. That’s what you get for being so fucking far away when I need you. If you want my voice, you have to give up a hand for it.” 

Clove imagines Gale’s nervous swallow in the ensuing silence. “Alright. I’ll… figure it out.” 

“Oh, will you? So very smart, my little whore is. So good with numbers. How many hands do you have?”

“Two.”

“And they both belong to me. You’re not going to figure anything out. You’re going to use both your hands exactly how I tell you to, and if that doesn’t feel like enough for you, maybe you should have considered being in our bed when I fucking want you to be.”

This gets only punched-out whine in response, and Clove turns the vibrator back on. 

“Get your finger slick for me.” 

“On which hand?” Gale asks politely.

“Such a brat. Just do it.” 

A brief pause. “Which finger?”

“None at all, if you don’t behave.”

The phone crackles with what could be a scoff or a laugh. “Alright. I did it.” 

“Touch your hole. Don’t press. Just touch.” 

“Ah–fuck. This is…”

“Have you really never touched yourself like this at all?” 

“No. Never. I always wanted–wanted it to be with you.”

“Mm. Well, you are with me now, my angel. When a finger finally pushes inside you, it’s going to be me doing it. Is that what you wanted, when you called me?”

“Yes. God. Yes.”

“Press just a little bit. Not much. Like you’re giving yourself a little massage.” 

Gale groans. 

“Good boy. I have a question, baby. When I dragged you away at that bar, when I took you, where did I take you?”

“Er, outside. Anywhere dark. Or, ah, if we couldn’t make it that far, the bathroom.”

“And did I make you excuse yourself to your colleagues? Or did I do it for you?”

“You made me do it.”

“Did you do a good job?”

“No.”

“And how did I tell you what I wanted, without giving it away to your colleagues?”

“You put your hand on the back of my neck.”

“Oh, you are that easy, lover. Good boy. Do you want to finger yourself?”

“Yes, please, please–”

“Go ahead. Press inside. Don’t give yourself too much. Just an inch or so.”

Clove is ever so glad his gasp is audible.

“Fuck, doing it to myself is–christ.”

“I’m doing it, baby,” she reminds him gently. “You’re just doing what I say. Do you feel tight?”

“Yes.”

“And hot? Nearly burning your finger hot?”

“Yes.”

“Fuck. Fuck yourself a little bit.” 

Gale gives a long moan, and Clove moans with him, picturing what he must look like right now, naked on a hotel bed with one hand wrapped around his lifted thigh to reach his hole, one finger disappearing inside in a steady rhythm, the other hand clinging to the phone, to her voice, to her.

“I bet you’re so fucking beautiful right now,” she purrs. “I have another question about your little fantasy. Can you answer another question for me, my angel?”

“Maybe,” he rasps.

“What if I wasn’t there?”

This confuses him, as she meant it to. “What?” 

“What if I didn’t actually show up, but I took you anyway?”

“How would you do that?”

“Just like I am right now. If I had called you while you were at that bar and told you to go lock yourself in a bathroom stall, would you have done it?”

The answer is immediate, on the very edge of a gasp. “Yes.”

This tips Clove over the edge for the second time, legs shaking and making damn sure to make enough noise for Gale to know it’s happening. She doesn’t bother turning the vibrator off this time.  

She sucks in a few steadying breaths, wriggles further down into the mattress, and closes her eyes. 

“Good. Good boy. You’d have to be so quiet, though, my poor little slut. What if there were other people in there, and you couldn’t talk at all? If I asked you a question, you’d have to text me the answer. Your hands might shake. Try it now for me, lover. Don’t talk. Text me what you’re thinking.”

“Clove–”

“Quiet. Text me what you want to say. No speaker phone. I’ll still be here when you’re done.”

Gale is not entirely quiet, because she can hear him swearing in a low voice as he fumbles with his phone. Clove, on the other hand, is relaxing back into the sensation of the vibrator, easing her way through the over stimulation, luxuriating in the anticipation of her text. Gale keeps her waiting a while. Typing an essay, if she had to guess. As usual.

what would you have me do for you in a bathroom stall? am i just goinb to jerk myself off so you can listen to me try to be quiet? is that all you want? 

Clove smiles as Gale’s panting returns to her ear. “Are you taunting me, lover?” 

“More. I want more. I need more.”

“In the bathroom?”

“Right now.”

“I could make you carry around a little packet of lube. Is that what you want? You could fuck yourself in a bathroom stall like a dirty little whore, reduced to texting me to beg me for more.” 

“Clove, another finger, please–”

“I can see it. Forehead against the door, forced to swallow all your filthy moans, reaching behind yourself, barely keeping a hold of the phone because your palm is so sweaty, and maybe you’re a little drunk. How would you come, my angel? You don’t have enough hands.” 

“I don’t know, Clove, I’m–”

“Take another finger, if you need it so bad. My slut can’t focus without feeling filled.” 

A pause. A strangled moan. Giving himself over to her, both in the bathroom and in his hotel room.

“I’d paint my cum on that door for you, enough hands or not. It wouldn’t matter.” 

Clove arches her back, leans into the vibrator, groaning. “Yes, good boy, I love you. And then you’d go sit back down at the table, with all your oblivious coworkers, trying to act normal, like the dignified academic you want to be, but I’d be texting you, baby, reminding you that you’re not; you’re mine. I’d send you all the dirtiest praise I could think of for my perfect little slut. A constant stream. You’d have to silence your phone. You’d have to know I’m far away, getting myself off to what you just did for me. Making all the noise I want, all cozy in bed, using a toy instead of your tongue. I came while you were in that stall, of course, but one orgasm wasn’t enough for me.”

“Clove, I’m going deeper than you said,” Gale sobs. “It’s so, I can’t–”

“You can’t help it. I know, baby. Being mine makes you so fucking needy. Give yourself what you want, just like you did in that bathroom stall. You know I’m right here, lover, even if I’m not in your ear for a moment. I’m right here, listening to you, fucking you, coming with you. Give yourself what you need. I’ll be here; I’ll come with you. Now, Gale.”

Gale drops the phone immediately, but he’s loud enough to still come through crystal clear. Yelling her name loud enough for his neighbors in the hotel to probably hear it too, crying out for who owns him, the only person can have him whenever she wants. Clove comes with him, tips into oblivion with the phone crushed so hard to her ear it’s painful, crying out for him too, hoping he hears her.

“Fuck.” Gale’s voice comes back to her, rushed and breathy. “Fuck, Clove. God. I love you. Thank you.”

Clove laughs softly, throwing the vibrator on the bed beside her with the rest of the mess she’s collected. “I love you too. Thank you. You take us to some really cool places with that brilliant brain of yours.”

“You make those places better than I could ever have imagined.” 

Clove squeezes her eyes shut, rolls onto her side, lets a few tears leak into the mattress. “Thanks. For that, and this whole night. It’s been really nice.” 

“Any time,” Gale promises warmly. 

And, as he intended, Clove takes that to mean many things.

She falls asleep with Gale’s soft snoring coming through her phone’s speaker next to her head. Loved, wanted, kept, even through pain or distance or insecurity, dreaming of far sweeter things than the eight months she spent without him. 

The next day, Clove goes for a walk, revisiting one of her oldest and most beloved spots along the river bank. She’s calmer today; a little tired in body and spirit, but sober, and out of bed, and settling back into the idea of herself as a person. 

There are still the things she knew two days ago, of course: a joke about her intelligence never goes over well, her hobbies are a private affair, embarrassment makes her angry, and some old wounds ache too much to ignore.

It all holds true, but beyond the cause and effect, there is a person who is more innately Clove than her quirks and flaws, the person she knows herself to be. Deep down, at the very root of the knowing, there is a person who wants to treat people with dignity, who tries to be fair in their anger, and who does not wish to punish anyone for an old mistake they can no longer fix.

Gale texted her good morning today, and maybe the next time he leaves town, that won’t be enough, and she will feel neglected and abandoned all over again. Today, though, she is content to know he thinks of her when he wakes up, and he’s coming back to her in a couple days, and he cares more to lessen her pain than he cares to win an argument.

It’s enough… and it’s not even all she gets.

Sitting on a rock, watching the water with tired eyes and a heart finally at peace, her phone starts to vibrate, and then it just keeps on buzzing.

Pictures. Over a dozen of them, arriving in a steady stream. The mountains from a plane window, an auditorium packed to the brim with smartly dressed mathematicians, a page of his copious and indecipherable notes, a patch of purple flowers next to the sidewalk, an amber drink in a moodily lit bar, a half-made hotel bed.

I’ve been taking pictures of everything that makes me think of you. I was going to share them with you when I got home, but it suddenly strikes me as rather pointless to wait. 

Clove snaps a picture of the river, and sends it back to him. 

waiting is never pointless. not if you know what you’re waiting for.

Chapter Text

Clove doesn’t usually come home from work drunk. It happens maybe a couple times a year, and at least one of those times, it’s because it’s Karlach’s birthday. 

Karlach, understandably, never works her own birthday, which means Clove always works it. The night always goes about the same. Karlach comes into the bar an hour before close, hooting and hollering and making a general scene and already a bit tipsy, and inevitably proceeds to get everyone in the bar drunk on the house, including her singular working employee. As every good bar owner should, obviously.

Clove has had a good night. All her favorite regulars were in, hoping to bump into Karlach before the night was over, and then the woman herself showed up, and, of course, made everyone in the bar laugh until they cried. All the booze made Clove’s closing chores feel like a fucking party, helped by the fact that Karlach insisted on helping, even though Clove told her to fuck off multiple times. It’s been one of those nights that reminds her how much she fucking loves her job, and her customers (some more than others), and above all, her boss.

It’s just that Clove has also been a bit… distracted by thoughts of a person she loves even more than her job.

Gale got himself all worked up this morning while she was still asleep. She woke in a slow haze to him grinding against her thigh, lips trailing up her shoulder and making the sweetest little noises, but by the time Clove was conscious enough to do anything about it, he checked his phone, saw the time, and bolted. 

Department meeting today, can’t be late, so sorry, love you!

Their phone conversation from a few weeks ago played over in her head for the millionth time as she watched him walk away from her, arm extended back to her in an empty gesture of regret, and tent still visible in his pants.

I was imagining the lengths you might go to. To drag me away. To take me. If you really needed me, and I’d made myself unavailable for too long.

Oh, she needed him this morning, but she let him go. Important meetings and all that, it felt right, but she’s regretted it ever since. She has yet to take him up on his very sweet offer to make himself available to her any time she chooses. She’s a little intimidated by the notion, if she’s honest with herself, but she’s been thinking about it. 

Today, the thoughts of it are more present than ever, and the alcohol only makes it worse. Half way through her closing chores, she texts him. 

Are you up?

No reply. Unsurprising. Sometimes Gale falls asleep before she gets home, especially on nights where she closes, which means she’s shit out of luck. Gale is a total crabass if he’s woken up before he meets his precious eight hour minimum.

Unless she is just drunk and impulsive enough to finally have the courage to take what she wants, regardless of his mood.

And… she just might be.

She takes one more shot right before she locks up, as a little private toast to the plan forming in her head, to holding her nerve, and to both of them getting what they truly want, because they trust each other enough to venture into every scary unknown together.

She texts him once more on her walk home. He won’t see it until after it’s over, but no matter how tonight goes, she wants him to have the reminder waiting for him.

I fucking love you. 

Gale is exactly where she expected him to be. Curled up in bed, one hand tucked under his cheek, hair fanned out across the pillow, mouth open and drooling a little bit. He’s fully clothed, obviously. Soft linen pajamas bottoms and the matching shirt, as per usual when Clove isn’t home to wrestle his clothes off him the second he climbs into bed. Sometimes he wears an eye mask, too, but not tonight. No, Gale didn’t quite make it to the eye mask, because Clove suspects he fell asleep preoccupied with the hand that is still jammed down the front of his pants. She bets it’s a mess under there. 

Tsk tsk. Couldn’t even wait for her.

The sight makes Clove’s cunt ache all on its own. She is struck, while still standing frozen on the threshold, with the wild, sudden urge to fuck him in his sleep. Take him apart before he ever opens his eyes. Take what’s hers while he’s still unconscious, because he couldn’t be bothered to wait, couldn’t make himself late for work, couldn’t stay awake to make sure Clove got her fill, and now she is out of patience.

They haven’t talked about that specific fantasy of hers yet, though, so it will have to wait. Clove takes a few steadying breaths. Replays the plan in her mind; watches Gale’s sweet face as he sleeps, blissfully unaware and snoring softly. She can do this. She can definitely do this. The alcohol in her veins is making her blood buzz loud enough to make ditching the plan impossible. She has wanted all day. It is time for her to have.

She strips naked, and climbs carefully into bed. The frame creaks as she positions herself on her knees beside him, but Gale doesn’t stir. Before she does anything else, she wraps her right hand firmly around the wrist that’s half disappeared under the elastic waistband of his pants. This was an unexpected but welcome addition to her plan, and she is not giving it up until he’s explained himself. She collects his hair with her other hand, bunches it up and secures a hold on it right down by his scalp on the top of his head. 

A leash, she thinks to herself with a trace of humor. She suspects Gale will be rather uncooperative to begin with. It might come in handy.

Gale firmly restrained where she most needs him to be, Clove leans down, and plants a kiss right on his open mouth. 

It’s not a very invasive kiss, not very forceful, and Gale more or less just grumbles about it in his sleep. He tries to turn his head, but at the very slightest resistance from her hand, he gives up. 

“Gale,” Clove calls, not quietly, surprised to find her voice already husky with lust.

At this, he frowns, and then groans. Awake enough to know he’s being woken up, then, though he still doesn’t open his eyes. Clove leans down and gives him a more insistent kiss, tracing the inside of his lips lightly with her tongue, lingering longer. Gale fully recoils, and Clove’s grip in his hair tightens just enough to keep him right where he is. 

“Ow!” he complains hoarsely, with more irritation than real conviction. He is abruptly conscious enough to remember where his other hand currently is and tries to yank it back, but is once again stopped. Finally, his eyes flutter open.

It takes him a few moments, and Clove waits patiently. He must have a strange view, to be fair. Her, naked, hunched over beside him, using both hands to restrain him, and her entire face reflecting exactly what her intentions are.

And, as she expected–and, to a certain extent, hoped–Gale doesn’t bite. 

“What time is it?” he croaks, decidedly cranky. “I was sleeping.” 

“Yeah, I’m aware. How’d you get to sleep, Gale?” 

His scowl deepens, and he fights uselessly against her hold on his wrist, but quickly gives up. Instead, to her actually very real surprise, Gale just fucking… closes his eyes again, like she’s going to let him go back to sleep to dodge the question.

Clove presses her lips to his once more, and this time she pushes further, licking into his mouth to just behind his teeth with a little hammed up moan designed purely to encourage him to fight harder, and it works. He yanks his head back, and this time when her grip in his hair tightens viciously in response, he whimpers. Very quick and very quiet, and he tries to turn it into a growl at the end, but it’s undeniable. Clove smiles.

“Maybe you’d be able to go back to sleep faster if you answered my question.”

Gale opens his eyes again, only to narrow them at her suspiciously. “Are you drunk?” 

“I didn’t say you could ask questions.” 

Gale pauses. A little shiver passes through him as he more thoroughly registers the mood she is in, the tone of her voice, the way he’s trapped with a hand down his pants and his scalp already stinging. Clove watches the goosebumps breaking out on his forearms with keen interest.

“I don’t remember how I fell asleep. I was exhausted.” 

Clove runs her thumb across the top of his wrist. “Is that right?” 

“Yes. Can I sleep now?” he snipes, but he squirms a little as he says it. Terrible liar, forever and always.

“No.” 

Gale, of course, does the brattiest thing imaginable, and closes his fucking eyes again. 

Clove growls, leans in once more, and thrusts her tongue down his throat. Gale thrashes hard, and Clove uses her hold on him to roll him onto his back, then crawls on top of him. She doesn’t let him come up for air for a fucking second, and it goes against her instincts a little bit, ignoring his struggling like this, but it’s also one of the hottest things she’s ever had the privilege of doing to anybody, ever, and it is becoming increasingly obvious that Gale is… enjoying himself. 

Such an easy slut. The fight’s already leaving him. His body is sagging into the mattress, head leaning into her grip on his hair instead of away from it, lips yielding to hers easily, moans growing louder as he puts less effort into containing them, and most telling of all, the hand she is keeping trapped under his pants has begun to move a little bit; she can feel it in the flexing of the muscles in his wrist. 

When Gale’s free hand lands on her left breast and gropes her greedily, she gives him his mouth back, suspecting he may behave better–

“How’d you fall asleep, Gale?”

–but Gale isn’t even paying attention. He’s touching himself with one hand and her with the other, eyes glazed over with sleep and lust, panting hard. 

“Gale.” 

“Just fuck me, if that’s what you woke me up for,” he snaps. 

Clove yanks his hand out of his pants, the other off her chest, and pins them above his head with one hand, and gives his hair a punishing tug. “Answer my question.” 

Gale is gasping for air, but he pretends like he isn't. “Or what?”

“Jesus christ,” Clove mutters, nipping harshly enough at his bottom lip to get a squeak out of him. “You’re the one that woke me up being a needy little whore this morning. Got me all worked up, then walked right out the door. You left me wanting all day, and then I come home to you, not only asleep, but with a guilty fucking hand shoved down your pants. So how about this? Since you obviously prefer pleasuring yourself, I’ll leave you to it, just as soon as I’ve made myself come once or twice on your thigh. Don’t worry, I won’t touch you at all. You can just be my little fucktoy. I’ll take what I want and go to sleep, and then you can take care of yourself, since you’re so good at it.”

Gale’s hips lurch off the bed at the word fucktoy, and Clove’s blood is roaring so loud she barely catches his humiliated little whimper. His hips can’t find her, anyway. He’s rutting against nothing but air. 

“Clove, no–”

“Oh, do you want more? Do you want me to help you?”

Gale nods around a strangled moan.

“How’d you fall asleep, Gale?”

“Touching myself,” he rasps immediately. “I was–all day, I couldn’t stop thinking about you. I wanted you the second I woke up. God, I–”

“You could have come to the bar to visit me.”

“I would have been hard at your bar.”

“You have been before,” Clove purrs as she lowers her hips to drag her core in one slow motion over Gale’s cock, probably soaking all the way through his clothes. “You’ve given me all sorts of dirty looks, undressed me with your eyes, whispered your filthy secrets to me. You’ve been trying to seduce me at my work since the day I met you. I don’t mind. You’re allowed to be my little slut when I’m at work, just like you’re my little slut when you’re asleep, or busy, or otherwise unavailable. Isn’t that right?”

Gale just groans, desperately trying to find more contact and getting increasingly frustrated when she pulls away, until finally, with what seems to be the last of the oxygen in his writhing body, he gasps, “yes.”

“Don’t move,” Clove orders, and then she releases him so she can instead tear his pants off. He’s more of a mess than she expected under his underwear, sticky and white and still very much adding to it, and his legs are already shaking violently, but he’s obviously trying so very hard to stay still for her. Fuck, this must be intense for him. Clove feels about two seconds from passing out herself. 

She cradles the side of his face as she climbs back up to reclaim his hands. “What do you think, lover? Is it nice being mine like this?”

A frantic nod. Clove reaches down to drag him through her folds, then lines him up with her. 

“This is what you wanted?”

He nods again, but she waits for him to grind out a broken little yes before she sinks down onto him. 

“Good boy,” she coos, and a tear slips down Gale’s cheek, and she doesn’t need to ask to know it’s a good kind of cry. “You just want to be taken, don’t you? You don’t want to have a choice. You just want it to happen to you. You want to be needed.”  

“Am I?” Gale gasps below her, already snapping his hips up into her. “Am I needed?”

“So impatient,” Clove murmurs, and then she pulls off of him after maybe only three rolls of her hips, ignoring his alarmed, punched-out whine, and begins to crawl up his body. She clamps a hand over Gale’s mouth before he can open it to protest. “You’d think you woke me up again. Being that desperate must make feeling needed hard, hm? Too busy needing, like the little slut you are. You already came tonight. What makes you think you’ll come again?”

She only releases the hand over his mouth once her cunt is inches away, ready to replace it, and to her surprise, Gale doesn’t even try to talk for the brief second his mouth is free. He just reaches for her, licking into her folds with a slow, steady fervor that makes the alcohol in her bloodstream turn molten. Clove still has his hands, and she brings them up and holds them firmly on her stomach, more to keep track of them than anything else. She knows where they would end up otherwise.

She doesn’t talk anymore, not while Gale is making all his delightful noises and eating her out like he has thought about doing this, specifically, all day long too. Like he daydreams about her orgasms, not his. Like devotion is not enough; he needs to be hers, actually hers, just for her to use and take and have. 

Clove hangs on for as long as she can, until she’s worried her thighs are squeezing his head so tight they’re hurting him and she’s so dizzy she’s in danger of pitching forward, and then she comes with a loud gasp, tossing her head back, eyes closed, legs like wobbly jello beneath her, Gale’s nails digging into her stomach as he clings to her. 

Then, she collapses sideways. Spent. Exhausted. Trembling. Satisfied. Gale is trembling too beside her, but from a very different set of emotions. He’s not touching himself, despite being, for the first time since he woke up, entirely free to move how he wants. His chest heaves as he stares at the ceiling, like just looking at her might be enough to push him over the edge. Clove goes so fond she could burst.

She rolls onto her back, reaching out with the back of a shaking hand to brush his cheek. “Gale.” 

“Yes?”

“Do you want to come?”

“Yes, but I, I won’t if you–”

“Come here, my angel. Come take what you need.” 

Gale finally risks a glance at her, eyes wide. “Are you sure?” 

Clove nods, and Gale is on top of her faster than she knew he could move. He nudges her knees apart, slides between them and sinks into her in one easy motion, exhaling forcefully as he does so, and Clove groans.

“Fuck, Clove, you’re–I really did want you all day. I can’t believe you woke me up like that. I’m glad. Thank you.”

“Anytime,” she whispers, and then Gale lets his head fall into the crook of her neck. Clove finds the energy to wrap her legs around his hips as his thrusts begin to pick up speed, trying to give him the best angle she can, and when she feels the familiar stutter of his hip that means his orgasm is imminent, she strokes his hair, and turns to bring her lips closer to his ear so she can talk to him the whole way through.

“I thought about you all day. I wanted to be right here, back in bed with you inside me, feeling you come apart for me. I’m so lucky I can have you whenever I want. I’d never leave you wanting, baby.”

Gale whimpers as he finally collapses into a boneless heap, pressing lazy kisses to her neck, and she can feel the wetness of his tears. 

“Is that what you wanted?” Clove whispers.

Gale laughs. “Yes, silly girl. Of course it was.” 

Clove hums contentedly. “Good. I liked it too.”

“You’ll have to do it again, then.”

“Only when it’ll surprise you, lover. You can’t expect it.” 

“Oh, I never will, I assure you.” 

<<

“Gale!”

Gale looks up, startled. Clove is standing in the doorway of his study, eyebrows in the vicinity of her hairline, annoyance written on every square inch of her face.

“What?”

“Have you not heard me calling your name?”

Gale hesitates, glancing down at his desk, littered with notes and books and scribbles that, up until a very limited number of seconds ago, had been the entirety of his world and attention.

“Ah, no. Apologies. What is it?” 

“Have you eaten anything today?”

“Er, well–”

“Drank any water?”

“I do believe–”

“Left this room for a single fucking second?”

“I think–”

“And you literally cannot hear me when I’m speaking to you.”

Gale hesitates. “It would appear not.”

Clove runs her tongue over her teeth. “Convenient.”

“I’m sorry, my dear. I’ve been caught up with this query a colleague brought to me, and you know how I am.”

“I sure do,” she says flatly. 

Gale winces. “I’ll be done as soon as I can?”

Why on earth did he say it like a question? Why did he say it at all?

Clove slams the door behind her, which is about what he expected. He sighs, makes a move with one leg to get up and follow her, but then a particularly interesting line of thought catches his eye among his colleague’s notes, and then…

A plate lands atop all his papers with significant force. Gale jumps a mile high. 

A sandwich. A few chips. His medication he did not take this morning because he came straight to his study. A glass of water lands with a similarly loud thud next to the plate. The condensation begins to soak into his papers. Gale immediately moves to pick it up, but Clove’s hand reaches it first, holding it firmly in place.

“Not a chance.”

“My notes are–”

“I don’t care.”

“That much is obvious,” Gale snipes.

The cup is slid slowly and deliberately down the page in response, until the water stain runs the entire vertical length of the paper. Gale sighs. She did just make him lunch, and he hasn’t even so much as acknowledged it. 

“Thank you for the food, my love. I promise, I’ll try and–”

“Eat.”

“What?”

“If I walk out that door again, you’re gonna set the food on the fucking floor or something, and three hours from now it’ll still be sitting there untouched. So eat. In front of me. Now.”

Indignation flares hot in Gale’s veins. “I don’t want to eat in front of you.”

“And I didn’t want to have to make you lunch just so your rotting corpse doesn’t end up stinking up the house a few weeks from now, yet here we are.”

“It’s just the smell that’s worrying you, is it?”

“Yup.”

“Clove, I will eat, I promise, and–”

“Gale,” Clove says firmly, reaching out and nudging the plate towards him with one finger. “You keep trying to promise me things, and I think it would save you a lot of valuable problem solving time if you understood that I don’t need your promises, because you are going to do exactly what I say, while I am standing here watching you do it.” 

Gale feels his face burning all the way in the tips of his ears, and as if purely to further his shame, his cock stirs in his pants. The indignation is still there, though, as fiery hot as his face, and he clings to it. “Am I?” he challenges through gritted teeth. 

A large, warm hand cups the back of his neck, and squeezes ever so gently. She nudges the plate towards him one more time. “Yes. And you’ll thank me for every bite.”

“Thank you?”

“I made it for you, didn’t I?”

Gale swallows, and Clove runs her thumb down the line of his throat, just to let him know she felt it. 

“How about this, lover?” Clove murmurs, leaning down to whisper her next words right into his ear. “I’ll make sure to tell you what a good job you’re doing the whole time. Would that make it easier?” 

A punched-out whine escapes Gale’s chest, and his cheeks burn hotter, but he doesn’t reply. Clove hums thoughtfully. Gale isn’t looking to see what she’s up to, so when she sets her phone down on his desk, propped up against a pile of books, camera open and turned front facing, Gale watches his own eyes blow wide.

“Look how fucking pretty you are like this,” Clove coos, right into his ear again. Gale watches himself grow redder still, her lips and nose poking into frame right next to him, her hand resting possessively on his neck. “Already beet red and sweating a little bit. You could be a good boy for me, and watch just how much you enjoy every second of it.” 

“Fine,” the man in the camera says, and it sounds bitchy, which is a surprise to Gale.

He feels the puff of air from Clove’s silent laugh before she stands up. 

Never has Gale been so agonizingly aware of every motion involved in taking a bite of food. One of the first times he got high, he became utterly convinced with every bite that he was somehow going to ‘forget how to swallow’, and it felt, at the time, like an all-consuming worry that made eating a single chip last a lifetime, but it has absolutely nothing on this. Reaching for the sandwich, picking it up, bringing it to his lips, tearing off a bite with his teeth, setting the sandwich down, and then, oh God, chewing. Watching is excruciating, but he can’t stop, couldn’t stop for anything, even through the goddamn chewing, with Clove’s thumb stationed just under his jaw so she can feel every clamp of his teeth, her slightly uneven breathing above him as she fucking stares, and Gale doesn’t even know  if she’s looking at the phone or him, because he can’t look at her.

He can only see himself; face burning so hot it may as well melt off, overwhelmed by dozens of equally intense emotions and every single one of them is visible in his eyes alone, just off camera his cock is fully hard and throbbing, and he is, somehow, only eating a sandwich that he cannot even taste.

Finally, at long last, he swallows. His eyes track the bob of his throat automatically. The man in the camera already looks… ruined. How many times is he going to have to do this? Can he even survive it?

“Good boy,” Clove murmurs, thumb stroking his throat once more, lingering briefly on his pulse point. Gale shivers. “And?” 

It takes nearly a full minute to bring himself to do it, staring right down the barrel of his own humiliation. He finally has to avert his eyes from the phone, whispering his gratitude to only the sandwich. “Thank you.”  

Clove hums her disapproval, but lets it slide. “Go ahead. Keep watching.”

The view in the camera makes him whimper, and this bite is, perhaps, even worse. Submitting to it a second time, acknowledging he will do this for as long as she tells him to, and he’s only getting harder as time goes on–it all makes his jaw so tense that chewing hurts. And this time, the praise is not so forthcoming. 

He swallows. He waits. He watches his own desperation. Clove remains silent. 

He has to say it first. He clenches a fist on top of the table in a useless show of defiance. “Thank you.”

“What was that?”

The man in the camera blanches, then grows redder still. “You cannot be serious.” 

Clove makes no reply, but her grip on his neck tightens ever so slightly. 

“Thank you,” he says quickly.

“You’re welcome. Another.” 

‘But you said!’ is what wants to come out of his mouth, needling and whiny and betrayed; he can see the words bubbling away behind his face, but that would only humiliate him further. Begging to be praised for eating a sandwich. Ludicrous.

The only protest he has is his inaction. 

When he doesn’t move, Clove winds her hand loosely around to the front of his throat, and leans down to his ear again. The man in the camera is utterly at her mercy, fully sweating and looking very near tears, a gently threatening hand wrapped around his throat, and he jumps at a sudden, quiet snap beside him. “You could try earning it.”

“I did,” Gale says weakly as he realizes the snap was the button on Clove’s jeans, which she is now pulling down.

“You can do better than that.” 

Oh yes, the man in the camera can certainly do better. 

Gale takes another bite, tears stinging insistently behind his eyes, dizzy with arousal. “Thank you for making me lunch,” he whispers. When Clove’s hand comes up from his throat to caress his chin approvingly, he sucks her thumb into his mouth just so he can watch himself do it, and moans at the sight.

She pulls in a sharp breath. “Oh. Fuck–god, you’re fucking perfect. But you have a job to do, baby. Focus.”

Gale relinquishes her thumb with a whimper, and hears Clove stepping out of her jeans as he watches himself take another bite. Clove moves her phone and the pile of books it’s resting against to the far side of the desk, giving Gale a wider angle that he doesn’t even look at because he is far too thoroughly distracted as Clove wiggles her way between his chair and the desk, pushes his plate off to the side, and hops up onto his desk, bare ass right on top of all his notes.

She reaches behind herself to adjust the camera so her body takes up less than half the frame and Gale is clearly visible, then turns back to him, reaching out to cup his jaw, tender and possessive at once.

“Thank you,” Gale says reverently, and he leans forward in anticipation, ever eager, but Clove tuts at him. 

“Keep going, my angel. You’re doing so well.”

His eyes flicker to the phone in time to watch his own face crumple and feel the delicious sting of shame, and then he whines. “Clove–”

“Do it. Now.”

So Gale does, and it’s the worst one yet, right in front of her, nowhere to look but at her cunt or her stomach or his own pathetic fucking  expression, because he cannot look at her face, not for anything. Halfway through chewing, Clove lifts one foot daintily into his lap and drags the arch of it over his cock in one slow motion, and Gale nearly chokes as he swallows.

“Christ, I’m–”

“Focus,” she says sternly.

“Thank you,” he gasps. 

“Good fucking boy. Come here.”

It finally makes Gale cry, the way she says come here. Maybe it’s the softness in her voice, or the sweetness of the command, or the relief that he watches paint his own face when she says it. The tears finally spill onto his cheeks as Clove cups the back of his neck and drags him down and forward, straight into her cunt. He groans, and lets his eyes slip closed for a blissful moment, just to enjoy. His haven, his reward, his favorite meal.

Clove was soaking for him, and she’s halfway gone before he’s even really gotten started. Her hips roll towards him on the desk, sending some of his papers fluttering to the floor around him, while a few others crease and crinkle beneath her ass. Watching her hips move in the camera is intoxicating, and his face buried in her cunt is by far the best view he’s had of it yet. Gale growls, reaching up to palm her breasts, eyes switching rapidly between the intensely erotic scene playing out on the phone screen and looking up to meet Clove’s wild gaze with watery eyes that he knows are screaming I’m yours I’m yours I’m yours, because he’s watched the way his eyes have been screaming it since before he took the first bite. 

Clove glances back once at the camera, and the view is apparently too much for her. She comes with a long, broken, groaned ‘fuuuuuuuck’ that makes both their toes curl. Gale watches her back arch in the camera, and whimpers. The moment she’s back on earth, before he can even finish cleaning her up, she nudges him back and hops off the desk. “Stand up. Take your pants off.”

Gale stands quickly on shaking legs and removes his pants and underwear. When he looks up again after kicking them to the side, Clove is holding lube.

“When the hell did you bring that in here?”

“Before I brought the food. You didn’t notice. Bend over.”

Gale gawks at her. “Pardon?”

“Over the desk. Hurry up.” 

She knocks the chair out of the way, steps behind him, and shoves him forward.

“Now.”

Gale scrambles to obey, lowering himself clumsily down onto his elbows with his ass jutted out maybe a foot from the desk. Clove reaches over him and repositions the phone, flipping it sideways for an even wider angle. Gale can see his face and the curve of his ass in the same shot, and he slams his eyes shut. “Fuck,” he squeaks. 

“Open your eyes. Watch,” Clove orders warmly. “Look how fucking gorgeous you are, bent over a desk for me. Look what you let me do to you. My perfect little whore, my angel.”

Gale can’t see her hand, so when her finger presses into him just as the word angel leaves her lips, it’s a surprise. He watches himself cry out, watches his whole body writhe like he’s trying to get both further away from and closer to the sensation, watches his face turn a red so deep it starts to look purple, his damp forehead resting heavy on the desk, biceps twitching as he struggles to simply hold himself up on his elbows.

“Fuck, you’re hot,” Clove gasps, and he feels a second finger prodding at his entrance almost immediately, because she is also starting to lose control. “Do you see how fucking perfect you look?”

“Yes, I see, more, more–” Gale chokes out, and the man in the camera begins to fully sob as she pushes a second finger into him. Clove runs a soothing hand down his back, shushes him–all false comforts, because then her fingers thrust deep with no warning, curl slightly, and Gale’s whole body snaps taut, and his vision blacks out. 

“Keep watching, baby. Keep looking,” Clove’s voice floats to him through the haze of white-hot pleasure, and he grunts as he refocuses his bleary eyes on the tiny phone screen, just in time to see a bead of saliva fall from his lips onto one of his papers. “I want you to watch yourself get fucked on top of all your precious notes. Look at my slut, all mine whenever the fuck I want, so happy to eat me out no matter how much I humiliate him. So grateful.”

“Yes, thank you,” he sobs. His eyes are too blurred with tears to make out the screen anymore. “Fuck, please, I need to–”

Clove reaches further up his body to thread her hand into his hair, and makes sure she has a nice firm grip on it before she speaks. “Touch yourself.”

Gale collapses the second he goes down to just the one elbow, and his hair is yanked inadvertently by the motion, but he doesn’t care. He is all too happy to let his scalp sting and his face be squashed into the desk so his freed hand can reach down and finally give his cock the relief it has been screaming for. 

Clove strokes his prostate twice with deadly precision as he tugs at his cock with no precision at all, and he comes with a long wail, and he swears he can hear his cum smattering over the front of his desk. He lays there for a long moment, still drooling a wet spot into the paper, panting hard, as Clove rubs his back, and her praise filters into his brain in little bits and pieces. 

Such a good boy… so perfect… love you… obedient… see how beautiful…. I love you.

Finally, when Gale has collected himself enough to lift his head, Clove slips out of him, helps him up, sits in the chair, and then hauls him bodily into her lap. “Fuck, lover. You’re something else.” 

Gale grunts, and Clove laughs, then falls silent. 

“Look at us,” she says softly, after a long while.

Gale forces his eyes open one more time to squint at the phone screen. The man in the camera is trembling and sweaty and half naked, and he’d look vulnerable except he’s wrapped up securely in large arms, and Clove’s face is practically glowing with contentment as she rests her cheek on the top of his head.

They look spent. They look happy, and they both smile at the same time. 

“We look like we need a shower.”

“We look perfect.”

>>

This drive was supposed to take ten hours. They planned to do it in one day, and at the time, that seemed like such a reasonable proposition. Five hours of driving each, a straight shot on two major interstates, a lovely little rental house at the end of it, waves crashing on the sand a mere forty feet from the back door, a private pool on the patio, and a bathtub with jets for their aching bodies.

Well, more fool them.

A torrential downpour almost as soon as they got on the road slowed traffic to a miserable, blind crawl and lasted over an hour; a major accident blocking two lanes of a three lane highway delivered another excruciating nearly three hours of delay; then, the cherry on top of their day, GPS routed them directly through a major city at peak rush hour. 

Needless to say, they are not making this drive in one day.

Gale took the second shift of driving, and Clove offered to take back over on about thirty different occasions, but he refused. By the time they are forced to admit defeat and look for a hotel, he is an endless well of bitchy and unhelpful comments, complaining about things that aren’t even worth the breath, snapping at Clove’s navigational skills every chance he gets, blaming every driver on the road for their every predicament, and Clove is… putting less and less effort into trying not to laugh at him.

Laughing off misfortune is not a skill Gale has learned, evidently. Clove knew this about him at one point, forgot, and was reminded of it somewhere around hour four of this fourteen hour day of driving. She has been getting herself in nonstop trouble about it ever since. 

It’s just that she is also, as hard as it may be for Gale to believe, not having a particularly fantastic day. She has simply learned, over the course of her thirty six years, how to not rain hellfire on the rest of the world about it. 

Then again, Gale is a little more used to getting his way than she is. A little spoiled. A little bit of a brat.  

Clove’s been working on that. 

So when Gale is a bitch, Clove laughs, and yeah, maybe it makes him bitchier, but maybe he deserves it.

They’re not even on speaking terms by the time they arrive at the hotel. Well, Gale is not on speaking terms, which is to say Clove handled the interaction with the clerk at the front desk while Gale stalked off to sulk in a lobby chair, and at that point the humor of the situation began to wear off, even for her.

Gale complaining about the hotel room is what finally breaks her. He’s muttering the complaints under his breath so she can’t fully make out what he’s even talking about, back turned but loud enough for her to hear him being an absolute bitch about a situation neither of them have any control over and a hotel room she booked. He throws his backpack on the floor with unnecessary force, and suddenly, somehow, after fourteen fucking hours, Clove simply cannot take it anymore. 

“Hey,” she barks. 

Gale kneels to rifle through his backpack. No acknowledgement of her existence. Not even a nod of the head.

“Was anything that happened today my fucking fault, Gale?”

Gale stands, turns with his arms full of toiletries, avoids eye contact as he brushes past her, goes into the bathroom, and shuts the door. 

For a full three minutes, Clove stands stock still. Blood pounding in her ears, hands curled up into fists, every stiff muscle in her body screaming with unspent energy and pure rage. 

It is tempting, admittedly, to just leave. March back down to the front desk and book a room of her own and imagine the surprise on his face when he comes out of the bathroom and she’s just gone. It’s an inviting fantasy, but it would also mean stooping to Gale’s sulky, passive aggressive bullshit, and that’s not really her style. 

Conversely, she could take the high road, and play nice. She could offer him a massage, and apologize for laughing at him. She could draw him out of his shell with kindness. She’s done it before. Plenty of times. She is perfectly capable of it.

But she’s not in the mood for that either.

Her instincts suggest to her another plan, an absolutely fucking ridiculous plan, almost as absurd as this day as been, and on this plan, she’s sold immediately.

Clove waits, and listens. The toilet flushes. Some nondescript shuffling occurs. The shower turns on. She forces herself to count to sixty five times in a row before she strips naked, takes a deep breath, and knocks on the bathroom door.

Gale does not respond. 

Clove didn’t really expect him to. She mostly knocked so he would know that his response is irrelevant. She’s coming in regardless.

The door to the shower is glass, so the second she steps into the room, Gale sees her, and she sees him, though a bit blurry.

“Can I help you?” 

Finally, he has remembered how to speak.

Clove opens the door, steps into the shower, and shrugs. “Just here to take a shower.” 

Gale’s not even soapy yet. He’s just been sitting under the water, steaming like the world’s bitchiest dumpling, for the last five minutes. He’s pink for a number of reasons, every single one of which Clove finds incredibly endearing, despite how taxing he has been on her patience today, and he has to open his mouth several times before he can come up with an adequately outraged response; grasping at straws to make himself appear angry and defiant, and doomed all the while by looking so deliciously pink and lovely. 

“Have you ever heard of waiting your turn?” he splutters finally. 

Clove is unimpressed. That’s all he could come up with?

“Who said it was your turn? You didn’t ask to go first. I’ve been in the car all day too, you know.” 

Clove nudges her way under the hot water, bumping Gale’s arm lightly, and he jumps away from her like she tried to stab him.

“Well, I got in here first. I didn’t know I needed to put it to a vote,” he huffs, but in his attempt to not let her touch him, he has effectively banished himself to the corner of the shower, entirely out of the stream of water, dripping wet and hackles raised like an angry, bedraggled cat, and it makes his argument lack… weight.

Gravity.

Clove bites back her laugh, but it sets him off anyway.

“Fine,” he snaps, and reaches for the door. 

Clove’s hand shoots out to catch him around the wrist. 

“Where are you going?”

“To wait my turn.” 

“You don’t like sharing?” 

Gale shoots her a glare, tugging at his wrist. “No.”

“Well, maybe you should learn. You can’t always have your way.” 

No longer pink to match the rest of him, his cheeks are a deep crimson now, painted with humiliation and indignation, and Clove isn’t risking a glance just yet, but she would bet money that his cock twitches appreciatively in response.

Maybe Clove is playing with fire, and maybe it’s unwise, but she’s willing to hazard a guess that she knows enough about Gale’s lines in the sand to know when he’s pissed, and just being pissy. And for all his drama, this is him being pissy. This is a temper tantrum. This is not worth worrying about, but absolutely worth punishing. 

Gale yanks once more at his wrist, and this time, Clove yanks back. Gently enough not to topple him over, but firm enough that he is forced into taking one tiny step towards her to maintain his balance. He backtracks immediately. “I am trying to let you have your way right now, actually,” he says, low and icy. “Since it seems no other way will do.”

“Oh, I’m the brat,” Clove says, voice growing suddenly dark, and then she yanks on his wrist with force.

Gale stumbles, which Clove was prepared for. He falls into her arms–an indignity she is certain only incenses him further–and Clove catches him securely, only to spin him around and shove him face first into the shower wall.

Clove presses her chest into his back, slots a knee between his legs, and presses one red cheek to the tile while the other grows redder by the second under her touch. Gale is a familiar sight like this: breathing hard, but clinging to his dignity far too fiercely to squirm, even as his words come out in uneven gasps. 

“If my point was that you enjoy getting your way, you’re rather proving my point for me right now.”

“Is this me getting my way? Or you getting yours?” 

“I just wanted to take a shower.”

Clove shakes her head as she smooths a hand down over his ass, pressing in closer, and Gale growls weakly in protest. “All you’ve wanted to do, all fucking day, is complain. You’ve cursed every car on the road, grumbled at every minor inconvenience, raged at every curveball the world has thrown at us. Nothing has catered to my little brat’s whims today, has it? And you just had to take it all out on me– my navigation, my attitude, my hotel choice, my jokes. None of it has been good enough for you. It’s all my fault.”

Gale finally squirms as a small, involuntary whimper escapes him, and he squeezes his eyes shut like that’ll help keep the next one in. He makes no other reply though, so Clove continues.

“You didn’t want to take a fucking shower, Gale. I know you too well for that. You wanted to ignore my existence and hog all the hot water and fucking sulk. So go ahead, tell me how bad this day sucked for you. Tell me how unjust it is that Gale Dekarios had to sit through some fucking traffic. Whine to me, baby. I’m listening.”

“Clove, I–”

It sounds a little vulnerable, a little wobbly, a little close to a dropped act and genuine regret, but Gale cuts himself off with a deep, shaky breath, and redirects.

“We paid for four nights in that rental, and now– ah!”

Clove’s palm lands on his right ass cheek. Not hard enough to really hurt him at all, probably just a disappointing little sting, but the way the sound of it echoes in the humid little bathroom is immediately intoxicating. Gale sucks in a ragged breath, then releases it with a whine.

“What were you saying, baby?” Clove murmurs. 

“We’re paying to spend one night in this hotel instead,” he says, then pauses, almost hopefully. 

Slut, Clove thinks affectionately, but she forces them both to wait. 

“And you didn’t book a very nice one,” he snaps with more venom, and Clove’s palm lands again, with enough force to make her hand tingle, and Gale groans hot and loud beneath her hand.

“Keep going,” she growls, kneading at his ass impatiently.

“I, ah–I don’t know.”

Smack. Harder this time, reverberating off the walls, painting his ass with the shape of a hand in a much more satisfying shade of pink. 

“You complain for fourteen hours straight and now you can’t think of anything?” 

“No, no–yes, I don’t know,” Gale whimpers. 

Smack.

“Fuck! I don’t want–the rest is…”

“What? Embarrassing?”  

“Yes.”

“Say it anyway.”

“Fuck, Clove, I’m–traffic, the weather,” he sobs as her palm lands again, loud enough Clove wonders who else can hear it.

“Do I control the weather?”

“No.”

“So maybe it wasn’t worth throwing a fucking tantrum about, huh?”

Gale seals his mouth shut in one last little act of defiance, but his hips are rutting pathetically against the shower wall, and Clove knows she’s already won this particular argument.

“Admit it,” she orders. 

“Fine,” he grinds out. “It wasn’t–I shouldn’t have taken it out on you.” 

“And?”

Gale shakes his head stubbornly, waiting for Clove to strike him again, and then his knees very nearly buckle beneath him when she does.

“I’m sorry!” he yelps. “Fuck, Clove, I’m sorry, please, I’ll make it up to you–”

“Yeah, you will,” she rasps, releasing his face so she can reach around and wrap a hand around his cock. “Yeah you fucking will,” she repeats huskily as her palm connects again.

“Fuck, oh my god, Clove, more–”

“Shut the fuck up and come for me,” Clove mutters as she delivers one last, deafening blow that finally makes her hand go numb, strokes his cock only twice, and Gale comes with a cry against the shower tile, whole body writhing against her and his ass a perfect, angry, humiliated red to match his pretty fucking cheeks. 

Gale’s legs are shaking violently, so it only makes sense for Clove to whirl him around and lower him, if a bit forcefully, down to his knees. It’s safer for him, really, to be on the floor, and then he’s right there, trapped between her and the wall once more, on his knees, and Clove simply can’t help but wind both hands into his soaking hair and drag his face into her cunt. 

Gale devours her like he really is trying to make up for fourteen hours of being a bitch, like he truly feels bad, or maybe like this is simply the best reward she could offer him for it. Maybe he’s actually plotting to do it again just to achieve the same result. Clove sighs as she tugs on his scalp, and his constant moan grows louder. Oh well. Her handprint is still marked on him. He still apologized. Clove will take it. 

She’ll take him, his tongue, his hair, his shaking hands clinging to her thighs like lifelines, his bright red ass cheeks. This is hers to take. A slice of paradise in this humid hotel shower, since they couldn’t reach their actual humid paradise today. 

“God, you feel fucking perfect,” Clove says, allowing a little tenderness back into her voice. “Good boy, good fucking boy, gonna make me come, fuck–”

Clove reaches out for the wall for support as the orgasm rips through her body, and she can feel Gale clinging to her thighs with more purpose, trying to keep her from falling. It’s probably safer for both of them to be sitting at this point, shaky and stiff and sore as they both are. Clove sinks to her knees as soon as she can manage it without collapsing, and tugs Gale into an exhausted, boneless hug under the spray of the shower.

“I love you,” Clove says with a little breathless laugh. “Are you okay?”

“Yes. Christ. Very much so. Much better than I was. I love you too.”

Clove giggles again. “That was fun.” 

“I agree,” Gale says, dropping an affectionate kiss to her shoulder. “I really am sorry about today, though. I was terrible to you.”

“Oh, it wasn’t that bad. You’re endearing, even when you’re being a bitch. I wouldn’t have taken that approach if I was actually really upset about it.”

“It was… a very bold approach.”

“Yup. That’s me.” 

Gale snorts, and Clove returns to giggling, and suddenly, it’s like they’re actually on vacation.

Chapter Text

A little smudge of sunscreen on his cheek where he didn’t quite rub it all the way in, a sunburn in miniature appearing only on the tip of his nose, just the portion where it pokes out from the shade of his sun hat, hairy calves stretched out along the lounge chair, a few tantalizing inches of thigh poking out from his shorts, sunglasses just a little too big for his face, book in his lap. No shirt.

Soaking in the heat like a lizard, smelling of sunscreen and chlorine, making half-dressed look prim and proper, pretty as a painting and so aware of it. 

Gale is where he belongs.

Clove, on the other hand, has taken three entire days to admit defeat and reconcile herself to the fact that, in this climate, shorts are a necessity. 

She had to go buy some.

Snuck out to the store while Gale was lost in his book, and to be fair, she found a pair that’s as inoffensive to her tastes as they possibly could be. Black denim, distressed, unadorned, making it less than halfway down her thighs. Nevertheless, she tugged them on with a heavy sigh, and now she’s slipping out the patio door feeling like she may as well just be in her underwear. 

Gale looks up immediately. The glasses make his expression difficult to make out, but there is no question that his eyes are on her.

He closes his book.

Clove draws closer, dipping a toe in the pool to test the temperature, fidgeting a little. “Hey.”

“Hello,” he says, taking his sunglasses off. “You’re wearing shorts.”

He almost says it like a question, even as his gaze is clearly fixed on her bare legs, and Clove rolls her eyes. “Good eye.” 

“I’m not sure I knew you owned a pair of shorts.”

“I didn’t. Had to go shopping.”

“Did you indeed?” Gale muses, tilting his head. “Come here.” 

Clove approaches slowly until she’s standing next to his lounge chair, and Gale reaches out with one hand, tenderly brushing her thigh with the back of it. 

Clove gives the brim of his hat a playful tug. “You’re acting like you’ve never seen my legs before.” 

“Context is everything, my dear.” 

“Is this really any different from me being in my underwear?”

“Yes.” Gale winds his hand around the back to grab her inner thigh, squeezing tight enough to make Clove suck in a sharp breath. “I could take you to dinner while you’re wearing these, for one thing.”

“And do what?”

“Admire you.” Gale slides his hand higher, squeezes again. “Touch you.” 

Clove snatches his hand away and sinks to a squat, resting her elbows on the edge of his lounge chair and keeping his hand trapped between both of hers. She eyes him over the tops of them. “You’d touch me at a restaurant, would you?” 

“Well, your thighs, yes. If you ever were to succumb to the horror of wearing a dress, there are considerably more things I’d be willing to do to you under a table, but I suspect that won’t happen anytime soon.”

“Gale Dekarios, you’ve got a filthy mind.”

“That you just so happen to love indulging.”

“Nuh-uh. Not this time. These shorts are between you, me, and the god forsaken ball of fire in the sky making this trip equivalent to vacationing inside a volcano. No restaurants.”

Gale lets his gaze linger on her thighs as he sighs, and somehow, it’s filthy. “Well, I ought to enjoy them while I can, then.”

Clove releases his hand, out of pure curiosity, just because she wants to know what he’ll do. 

His fingers are up to the second knuckle underneath her shorts before she can even suck in a breath, exploring her inner thigh like he’s a very dedicated cartographer and these are uncharted lands, like she doesn’t wrap her thighs around his head all the time, like he isn’t intimately acquainted with every inch of skin in this region of her body.

Clove bites down on her lip as his fingers push far enough to reach the already sweat-damp crease of her thigh. 

Gale knows he is succeeding in making her wet in these god forsaken shorts while it’s some unholy amount of degrees outside and he’s in a fucking sun hat. He knows, and he is ever so smug about it, and it is simply too hot outside for Gale to be so goddamn smug. Clove grabs his hand, and grinds his palm once over the denim covering her core, exaggeratedly slow, drawn out enough for Gale to have time to raise his eyebrows about it. Then, much more quickly, she slips his sunglasses back on his face, uses the back of her index finger to wipe the little spot of sunscreen off his cheek, presses a kiss to his knuckles, and stands up. She tugs once more at the brim of his hat. 

“No restaurants.”

Gale shrugs, steals one more wistful glance at her thighs behind the glasses, and reopens his book. 

*

The next day brings another, much more… exciting shopping trip, brought about by a post-orgasm light bulb moment late last night.

Gale is in the same spot when she returns, hat in place, sunscreen smudged on the tip of his nose this time–right on the tiny little sunburn that he agonized about for well over an hour last night–and the same book in his lap. Picture perfect, as always.

Clove is back in the shorts, somewhat more willingly today, and it gets his attention just as effectively. This time, she has a small paper bag in her hand, too.

“Did you go shopping again?” he asks mildly, closing his book. 

“Yeah.” Clove arrives next to him, and he caresses her thigh in greeting. 

Nibbling at the bait.

“Care to share?” 

Clove sits on the edge of his chair, and wipes the sunscreen off his nose with her thumb. “Well, actually, I have a deal for you.” 

“Do tell.” 

“I’ll wear the shorts to a restaurant with you.”

“If?”

Clove hands him the bag, and bites her lip. “If you… wear that.”

The blush as Gale inspects the box he fishes out of the bag is enough to make this worth it already. He’s cherry red by the time he manages to clear his throat.

“This is, er…”

“A butt plug,” Clove supplies helpfully.

He takes his sunglasses off, as if that’ll help him see it in a less intimidating light. “Yes.”

Clove smiles. 

“Does it… do anything?”

“Yeah. It vibrates. There’s a little remote.” 

Gale blushes harder. 

“I wouldn’t use that part in the restaurant, though. I mean, I would like to try the remote, but we could do that privately. I just want to… know it’s there. I want you to know it’s there.”

Gale swallows. “Oh, I have no doubts I’d be intensely aware of its existence.” He stares at the box, little furrow between his brows ever deepening.

“You could open it,” Clove suggests softly. “See what it feels like?”

Gale opens the package like it’s an active bomb.

The toy is a vibrant purple, high quality enough to feel nice in the hand, and as simplistic a design as she could find. It suits him–not that she plans on telling him a butt plug reminded her of him.

Gale hands the remote to Clove immediately, straight out of the box without so much as a glance, like he knows he has no reason to learn how the controls work, and Clove squeezes her thighs together.

“Is it charged? Can you turn it on?”

Clove clicks the plus symbol, and it hums to life. Gale’s eyes widen as he presses it into his palm.

“Well?”

“It’s quite powerful.”

“And?”

“Well, we can try,” he says doubtfully.

“What are you worried about?”

“That it will be… uncomfortable.”

“If it is, we can ditch it,” Clove says with a shrug, switching it off. “I’ll wear the shorts for you either way. I was mostly kidding about that part. I just really want to try this with you.” 

“May I ask why… now?”

Clove leans in for a kiss, but his fucking hat is in her way, so she plucks it off his head and tosses it on the table next to his chair. His hair is in a messy bun high on his head to keep it out of his way and under the hat, and god, Clove wants to shrink him down and stuff him in her pocket. She finally gets her kiss, unobstructed and syrupy slow, hand trailing appreciatively over his sun-warmed chest. 

“I feel a little out of place on this particular kind of vacation, lover, but you belong here,” she murmurs. “You belong in the heat, under the sun, next to the pool, with your book and your hat and your sunglasses. You make it look so good, so easy. You make it look much better than I do, and it makes me want to mess you up a little. I want you a little on edge–the way I feel in these stupid shorts. I don’t want you to belong here, in the sun, all comfy and relaxed. I want you to belong to me. I want you to know it.”

Gale tugs her back into a kiss with nothing but his teeth on her lower lip, a hungry little moan in his chest, and nods. 

“Dinner tonight, then?” he breathes.

Clove coaxes one more whine out of him with her tongue before she lets him go on a sigh. “Yeah. Tonight.”

“And you’ll… help me get ready?”

“Of course, silly man. That’s half the fun.”

To his credit, he only looks a little bit nauseous about it.

Gale downs a glass of white wine in the kitchen before he showers, and when he comes out, pink and clean and so obviously nervous, Clove presses him down into the mattress with as much tenderness as she can manage.

She really is touched he agreed to this so easily. His willingness to take any leap she asks him to and trust she will catch him, even when the idea really does scare him, is not something she takes lightly. She has been ruminating on the feelings it stirs in her chest for the several hours since they discussed their dinner plans, and it has left her feeling stupidly fucking lucky and disgusting amounts of in love with him and so fucking determined to make this nice.

A full body massage seems an appropriate first step in that direction, and if this confuses Gale at all, he doesn’t mention it. He is pure contentment beneath her, eyes closed, mouth hanging open slightly, groaning softly, asking no questions.

She saves his ass for last, of course. She spends a very long time on it, too, getting him as worked up as she can, until he’s squirming and moaning beneath her, just on the edge of begging for more, and then she slicks up one finger and continues the massage with just that, moving in tight circles around his rim. She leans down over him as she works, kissing a trail up his spine, and landing with her lips at his ear. 

“You’re going to take it so well, baby. You’re going to do such a good job, and then once it’s in, you’ll feel so stretched, and so full, and so comfortable. You’ll feel so proud of yourself, so accomplished, and I’ll be right here in your ear telling you what a perfect fucking slut you are for me, and then maybe I’ll let you come for me once before dinner. Does that sound good, baby?”

Another nod, accompanied by a soft little whimper as Clove pushes past the tight ring of his entrance with one finger. 

The massage was effective at relaxing him. It could be the nerves, too, but Gale is not fighting her. Not squirming, not tensing, not begging. He’s letting her do this to him because he trusts her to make it nice, no matter how afraid he is, and he wants to be relaxed, if that’s what she wants from him. Trying so hard, for her, for everyone, at everything, all the time. 

“You’re so good for me, Gale,” she coos, free hand stroking fondly down his back, memorizing every curve of him. “You’re such a good boy, so eager to please. You want to wear this toy to dinner for me. You want to take anything I give you.” 

Clove curls her finger, finds the right spot, strokes once, and Gale’s body jolts. 

“It makes you nervous, and you want to go slow, but really, this is my hole to do whatever the fuck I want to, because that’s the way you want it to be. That’s how you want to feel, isn’t it, baby? Owned? My prized possession, sitting all pretty at the dinner table in public with a toy shoved up his ass.”

“Yes, Clove–oh fuck!” Gale cries out beneath her as she adds a second finger. He tries to muffle the shout by turning his face to bury it in the comforter, but it doesn’t work. 

“Nobody would ever expect it of you, would they? Nobody would think my sweet, well dressed, academic boyfriend is hiding such a dirty secret. Nobody will know what a slut you are except me.”

“Fuck, I want that, I want– mmph!”

He bites the comforter this time, words choked off this time by Clove nipping harshly at the flesh of his ear. He whines at the loss of her when she sits up, even though he’s still pinned beneath her, still getting fucked by her, still the focus of her undivided attention and all her desire.

“What do you want, Gale? Tell me.”

“I want to–to belong to you,” Gale says, half whimpering, tears on his cheeks. “I want to be your property. I want to know it, Clove, please, now and when we’re out; I want you to make me feel it. Fuck, Clove, do something, anything, please, take me–”

Clove’s palm answers, landing on his ass with a loud smack. Gale cries out again, hands twisting in his own hair, pulling on it himself since Clove’s hands are occupied. 

“Fuck, yes,” he hisses. 

She smooths her hand over the red skin–a comfort and a threat. “Do you want more, baby?” Clove murmurs.

Gale nods frantically. “Yes, god, yes–”

“Of course you do,” she purrs as she pushes inside him with a third finger, and Gale finally thrashes beneath her, tensing around her fingers. “Shhh, relax, baby. I know it’s a lot, but you can take it. Trust me. You’re so fucking ready for me, baby. When I spanked you, I felt you relax. Do you need more of that, too?”

Gale nods again, and whimpers as Clove’s palm lands again, sending little ripples rolling up towards his back and down his thighs. The third finger is fully in now, and Clove puts the weight of her body behind her hand, sinks down on him with a roll of her hips, crooking her fingers just right, and Gale wails.  

“God, it would be fun to fuck you,” Clove mutters, and promptly makes sure to give him no time to panic about this comment. She removes all three fingers, and gives his ass a much more gentle pat. “Up on your knees, lover.”

Gale obeys, trembling a little, while Clove grabs the toy from the nightstand and gets it ready for him. She sees him eyeing it dubiously from his very vulnerable position, face resting on his forearms and ass in the air like the prettiest slut she’s ever seen, and she smiles.

“You’re going to take it so easy, baby.”

Gale wiggles his ass at her. “Hurry up, then.”

Clove raises her eyebrows. “Oh, I can go much slower.” 

“We have dinner reservations,” Gale says smugly.

Clove rests a hand on his hip as she leans down close to his ear again. “Only one of us gives a damn about being late, Gale, and you know it’s not me.”

The smugness recedes, and Gale changes course. “Please?”

Clove laughs, smacks his ass a little harder, hard enough to make him huff, and sits back up. “You can be awfully impolite, for someone with such good manners usually.”

“You like it.” Bitchy. Defiant.

Smack.

Gale moans, and Clove thrusts two fingers back inside him. She lines her hips up with his, lets herself feel the little thrill, once again, of feeling the force of her weight behind her fingers, the mimicry of fucking him for real.

The heavy heat in her cunt is starting to be distracting, and she desperately wants to touch herself, but this is not the time. Gale comes first, for right now–in every sense. Making this nice for him is still all that matters.

She could add the third finger again, but she doesn’t need to. Gale is ready. She knows he is. She withdraws her fingers, transfers the toy to her messy hand, and winds the other around his waist to find his cock and give it one, long, slow pull as she touches the toy to his hole. Gale breathes through the anticipation, Clove coos a quiet good boy, and then she begins to push. 

It goes slow, but with no real difficulty. Clove strokes him the whole time, not enough to make him come, just enough to keep him distracted, keep him breathing, keep him calm. 

“Good, you’re almost there, baby. God, you’re hot like this, ass in the air, letting me fill you like this, fuck–”

Gale whimpers, and the widest girth of the toy slips past the last of his resistance, and the toy settles into place. They breathe in silence together for a long moment. Clove smooths her hand over his ass, and Gale groans.

“How do you feel?”

“Like I…” Gale breaks off on another soft groan, writhing a little. “Like I can’t–like I’m, I’m being held open. I knew, I mean, I knew, obviously, but I could not have imagined–fuck, christ–Clove.” Her name comes out as a high whine, and he rolls his hips into her hand.

Clove moans, kneading hard at the flesh of his ass, pressing his hips down into her hand in encouragement. “Fuck. Does it feel like I’m holding you open, Gale? Is that what you’re going to be thinking about while we’re at dinner? You just have to exist, while so fucking full and you can’t get away from it; can’t squirm, because people would see; can’t whine, because people would hear you. Just have to sit there and take it for me.”

Clove isn’t stroking his cock anymore. She is letting Gale do the work as he bucks into her hand at an increasingly frantic speed, and Clove wonders if she’s about to come from nothing but fucking air and the tiniest bit of friction from Gale’s ass as she grinds herself against it.

Gale is fucking beautiful enough for her to believe she could. Mouth hanging open and drooling a wet spot into the comforter, fucking her fist with rising abandon, sobbing her name as that little toy does absolutely nothing but sit there. Her claim, her mark, hers.

“Clove, please,” he begs beneath her. “Tell me I did it, tell me I’m yours now, tell me–”

Clove snaps to attention. She’s been so caught up in her own pleasure that she neglected him, forgot what she said she’d tell him, what she’d let him do–

“You took it so well, baby. You did such a good job, and you’re so fucking beautiful like this. My perfect little slut, my angel, my Gale. You’re all mine. It’s all you’re going to think about, I promise. I won’t let you think about anything but how I own your pretty little hole. That’s what you want, isn’t it?”

“Yes, Clove, please–”

“Can’t believe I get you, get this, god–you’re fucking perfect like this.”

“Clove,” he rasps, face contorting with the urgency of it, and his hips begin to stutter. “Please–”

“Come for me, lover.” 

Watching Gale as he obeys her command–bright red, writhing, flared base of the toy snug against him and not going anywhere–sends Clove hurtling over the edge herself, with nothing but the flesh of his ass trapped between her hand and her clit and the fucking sight of him, and as it’s happening, it surprises her, but she should have known, really.

She leans on him for a bit, winded and dizzy, and then she sits back on her haunches, and Gale immediately collapses onto his side. The comforter is ruined, she knows, from drool and cum and probably lube, somehow, but Clove would wash it ten times over for what she just got to do.

Clove runs a firm hand down his leg, all the way from the top of his thigh down to his heel. Goosebumps rise in her wake. “Gale, you wanna know something crazy?”

He nods feebly.

“I didn’t actually know sex could be that hot. I thought it peaked, like, a year ago, but it just never stops getting better.”

It’s a wonder his face can flush any darker. “I feel the same,” he mumbles.

Clove throws herself down alongside him, slings her limbs over him carelessly, and makes the closest sound to a purr she can possibly make. 

After only a minute or so, though, Gale becomes restless. It’s lucky he’s far too trapped to go anywhere. “What time is it?”

Clove snorts. “Don’t worry about it.” 

“Well, we do have a res–”

“Oh my god, Gale.”

He pauses. “What?” 

“Shut up and let me cuddle you.” 

“But, I…”

Gale squirms, and Clove sucks in a breath. Oh. 

“Is cuddling difficult right now, lover?”

“No,” he says stubbornly. “I just don’t want to be late.” 

“You’re not distracted from the cuddling by the way your ass is stuffed with a toy? Not a little eager to get to the restaurant so you can get turned on by it in public? That’s not it?”

Gale shivers as her hand roams dangerously close to the part of himself he cannot stop thinking about, but he remains determined. “No.”

Clove laughs. “Alright, fine. Let’s get ready, then. Fuck cuddling after sex, I guess.”

This guilts him into another ninety seconds or so, and then he’s scrambling anxiously out of bed and leaving her behind. His first step away from the bed, however, makes Clove wonder if him wearing this toy to a restaurant is… not entirely feasible.

A snort escapes before she can think better of it, and Gale turns to glare at her. 

“Sorry,” Clove giggles, “it’s just–you look like a cat who got put in a harness for the first time. You look like you forgot how to walk. Is this plan a dud?”

Gale shakes his head stubbornly, and takes a few more steps. He adjusts to the sensation quickly, and with a few measured breaths and some clearly concentrated effort, his whole body visibly relaxes.

“Good boy,” Clove murmurs, still from her position on the bed, ogling him. 

Gale pretends like he isn’t blushing. “I’ll be fine,” he says primly. “Are you going to get ready or not?” 

Clove rolls her eyes. “Yeah, yeah, I’m coming. Jesus.” 

Maybe, Clove thinks, this will be his mood for the night–on the bratty side, refusing to acknowledge it, trying to act indifferent, cool, collected. She would certainly enjoy that, particularly taking him apart at the end of it, but a small part of her had, admittedly, envisioned a different mood for the night. A softer Gale, a needier Gale. A Gale who has, from the very start, been so very nervous about taking anything up the ass, but now he’s taken a toy so nice and easy, and he’s wearing it in public for her, and he cannot squirm his way out of the fact that he likes it. Perhaps that version of tonight is simply a fantasy, and will remain a fantasy.

But, once again, Clove should never have doubted Gale’s ability to surprise her.

“Clove?” comes his soft, more reticent voice from behind her as she buttons up her shorts.  Clove turns, and Gale quickly grabs her hand and presses something into it before she can see what it is. 

“Take it with us. Please. In case I–just in case you decide you want it.”

Clove looks down into her hand.

The remote. 

She has to take a second. 

A second to collect herself so she can refrain from shoving Gale back onto the bed right now and turning the toy up to the first intensity that makes him cry and then taking a seat on his pretty fucking face. A second for the wild desire flaring inside her, burning hot as the sun, to settle deep into her bones and cool to simmering, delicious anticipation. She exhales shakily, turns the remote over once in her hand, then glances up at him, eyebrows raised in question.

Gale gives her a little nod. 

Clove slips the remote into the front pocket of her hoodie, and plants a wet smooch on his cheek. “I fucking love you.” 

*

The walk to the restaurant is not as tense as Clove expected. Gale is hanging off her arm, close and giggly and delightful, and if anything, the dirty secret they share is just the cherry on top of what would already be a dreamy night, because hell, they’re on vacation, and the weather’s cooling off as the sun goes down, and the ocean is audible from everywhere, and every so often, Gale’s hip bumps hers. Clove’s heart is thrumming with it all, and her fingers are wrapped tight around the little remote–his pleasure, his trust, his dignity, his body, all offered freely, pressed right into the palm of her hand.

Gale likes the shorts, too. To almost a mystifying degree. Clove offered the trade in somewhat bad faith; she knew her end of the deal was weak in comparison, but Gale appears none the wiser to it. He is content with the extra skin, the new view, the quiet walk, the unsubtle gropes. He doesn’t seem to want for much of anything, really–until they sit down at the restaurant.

Then, he begins to squirm, and Clove watches on with great interest.

Maybe it’s just the act of sitting down. Maybe it’s that they’re seated on the same side of a booth to give each other easier access for touches high enough up the thigh to be best made in relative privacy. Maybe it’s that one of Clove’s hands is always in her pocket, wrapped around the remote. No matter what she’s doing, she never lets it go, even if it means touching Gale a little less. Touching the remote is equivalent to touching him, and with every nervous glance down at her pocket, Clove can tell he knows that.

She is still not going to turn it on in the restaurant, obviously, but having the option is intoxicating all by itself, and it appears to be even more intoxicating to Gale. He squirms, and he blushes, and he squeezes Clove’s bare thighs like they’re all that’s keeping him tied to this Earth, and eventually, just as the food arrives, he begins to sweat.

“Are you uncomfortable?” Clove asks in a low voice when Gale makes no move to touch his food.

Gale shakes his head, eyes flickering around them anxiously, like someone might somehow both hear them and be able to discern what the fuck they’re talking about. “No, it is… pleasurable.” His face flushes further as he shifts again in his seat. “I want more,” he admits under his breath–ashamed, confessing anyway.

This restaurant, like every other restaurant they’ve been to here, is freezing. Clove learned on this trip that where the climate is hot, the buildings are frigid. The shorts intimidated her on that basis alone, and she was grateful for just the warmth of Gale’s hands, but now she fucking burns, hot as the sun, every inch of her. “Fuck,” she breathes, staring at the pink in his cheeks like it’s the last meal she’ll ever see, and it is finally Gale’s turn to shiver. “Eat your food.”

Like a good boy, he obeys.

He only finishes about half his food, which Clove refrains from commenting on. She scrapes her own plate clean, and Gale makes no comment on how long it takes her to do so, though he so clearly wants to. 

Clove is taking her time, and Gale’s squirming is… devolving. 

He has palmed her over her shorts three times and whimpered out loud exactly once by the time the server drops off the check. Clove clicks her tongue at him as they wait for the server to return with his card and the receipt. 

“You’re being naughty, lover.” 

“It’s rather difficult not to be.” 

“What if our server gets an eyeful?”

“We’ll be forgiven. I tip generously.” 

Clove smiles. “I know. Are you ready to go home?”

“Yes.”

Clove chuckles. The server returns shortly, Gale scribbles on the receipt, and then he’s out of the booth at the speed of light, but his first step once he’s on his feet is… decidedly awkward, and he is forced to stop and adjust all over again. Clove has to bite back a laugh as they share a knowing glance. 

She leans in close to him as she stands up. “Slut,” she whispers, under her breath, just as her lips brush his ear.

Gale shudders, and heads straight for the door.

As soon as they make it onto the sidewalk, however, Gale lurches to a halt, grabs her arm and pulls her aside, voice urgent. “On the way home, before we… before we arrive, at some point, I want you to turn it on. Please.”

This would ruin Clove even if he wasn’t fucking breathless just from asking, if he wasn’t so pink and lovely and asking her right in front of a busy restaurant, smack dab in the middle of all their outdoor seating, because he just couldn’t wait. As it is, she feels about ready to combust into flames right here on the sidewalk.

She steps into him, pulls him into a kiss, letting her hand rest on the small of his back, as close as she can get to his ass while staying on this side of decent in front of the diners.

“You don’t want a warning?” she mutters. 

Gale shakes his head. “Surprise me.”

Clove gives him a wicked smile. “I’ll try my best.”

There are multiple detours on their way home, because Clove is nothing if not a master of deceit. Gale is unworried by the first stop at a drugstore for Clove to buy chap-stick, but the second detour through a mostly empty park makes him… fidgety.

By the time they leave the park, Clove can just make out the fresh sheen of sweat on his forehead when they pass under the streetlamps. She turns the remote over in her pocket, runs her fingers over the buttons, and shivers. 

Closer to home, she tugs him onto the beach, through the sand and out onto a pier to soak in the thrill of the dark waves crashing underneath them. Gale stands as close as he can, clinging to her arm again, shaking a little bit. 

“I wouldn’t let you fall in,” she murmurs, kissing the upper curve of his ear. 

“I know,” he whispers.

“You’re shaking.” 

“I’m not; I’m fine,” Gale says stubbornly. He makes a concerted effort to stop shaking, which only makes him shake more.

Clove smiles as she kisses his temple. “Let’s go home.”

At this, Gale finally becomes visibly anxious. The thought that she would deny his request entirely hadn’t crossed his mind. 

Good.

They make it all the way to the gate leading to their little villa, a number-coded padlock and a short walkway all that stands between them and home, before Gale opens his mouth. 

Clove is faster.

She pushes him up against the gate, seals her lips over his, thrusts her tongue deep into his mouth, and turns the toy on. 

The noise Gale makes against her lips is unseemly, and god knows how loud it would have been without her muffling it, but more intriguing still is the way his whole body arches involuntarily into the sensation, and his tongue goes slack in his mouth. Putty in her arms. 

Clove turns it off, and Gale whimpers into her mouth. 

“How was that?” 

“You certainly put it off long enough,” he snipes, not missing a beat.

“Oh, lover,” Clove purrs. “Do you know what would have happened if I did it earlier, like you wanted?” 

Gale clearly intends to reply, almost assuredly with something even brattier, but she turns the toy back on, and he gives up all thought of it.

“You were so naughty, asking me for that in the middle of the sidewalk. My little slut, begging me to play with his asshole in public.” Clove reaches around and finally gets a handful of his ass, and taps twice on the base of the toy through his pants. Gale’s knees buckle, but Clove catches him before he falls, hauling him back up and crushing him to her chest. “If I had done this any farther from home, Gale,” she says darkly, right in his ear, “you wouldn’t have made it home.”

She clicks it off. Gale sinks his full weight into Clove’s arms, head landing heavy on her shoulder. 

“Am I wrong?” Clove whispers.

“No,” he pants. “I don’t even know… about now. From here.”

“Oh, I’m not carrying you. You’re going to punch in the code to this gate, walk into the house, and go lay on the bed.”

“I don’t think I remember the code, at this point.”

“60471.”

“Clove,” he whines. 

“Oh, my poor mathematician. Forced to remember five numbers.”

Gale huffs, but fails to argue.

Clove releases him slowly so he has time to get his legs under himself, then takes a step back. “Go.”

Gale makes it three digits in before the toy hums to life. He lurches, gate clattering as he clings to it, and hits an eight by accident. “Fuck,” he curses quietly. 

It takes him two more tries, and Clove does him absolutely no favors, but he successfully unlocks the gate. The walk up to the house is calm, mostly for fear of him falling over, and then as soon as his hand lands on the door handle, the buzzing returns. 

“Clove, fuck,” he gasps, fumbling for his keys as he leans on the door for support, but then Clove hits another button, and the buzzing grows louder, and Gale’s spine arches again without his say so. Clove steps in to provide additional support because, without her, Gale would more than likely be on the ground right now. She presses him into the door much harder than she needs to, and feels him up shamelessly for her trouble before she clicks it off and releases him, one hand lingering on his hip just in case. Gale’s fingers tremble as he unlocks the door.

Clove leaves it off after that, because she’s running out of patience herself.

Gale makes it to the bed, and he is about to collapse onto it when Clove catches him around the waist. “Wait.” 

She tugs his pants and underwear down around his shaking legs, offers him a hand as he steps out of them, pulls his shirt over his head, then nods to the bed. 

“On your back.” 

When Gale is settled on the bed, pretty as ever, Clove turns the toy back on, then bumps it up three settings. 

Gale’s eyes go wide, and he squirms hard, twisting the sheets. “Oh, fuck. Clove, that might be–”

“Shh,” Clove soothes, stripping out of her shorts and pulling her shirt over her head. “You can take it, baby. Just relax.” 

The sheets twist further as Gale writhes on top of them, shaking his head, not a single muscle in his body unengaged. “It’s so much. Clove, it’s–it’s so much.”

Clove hears the rising panic in his voice, and climbs quickly on top of him, lowering herself face to face with him, cradling his cheek. “Gale. You’re okay. Stop squirming.”

Gale obeys slowly, eyes trained on Clove’s face, brow furrowed with effort. As soon as he’s motionless, a sigh leaves him. His muscles disengage. His body sags into the mattress. 

“Yes, baby, good. Good boy. Lay still for me. So fucking good. Sat there at that restaurant all pretty for me, thinking about more the whole time because you couldn’t fucking help yourself.” Clove shifts as she talks, crawling up, up, up. “So happy to be filled, so eager to be mine. Fuck, show me, Gale. Show me how much I own you.”

A broken whimper escapes Gale’s chest as he opens his mouth to greet her eagerly, and Clove shudders. God only knows how wet she must be after sitting at that dinner table, walking home, watching him struggle to make it inside, and underneath all the pathetic little whines Gale is burying in her cunt, she can still hear the cause of his torment, that low, insistent buzzing. 

“God, so fucking hot, gonna make me come so fast,” Clove gasps, pitching forward to rest on her hands, thighs squeezingly around his head desperately without her having any say in it. Gale chokes a sob against her, and his hands cling like vices to her hips. The tight coil of pleasure is already there, already building rapidly, and Gale is eating her out like she’s the other half of his meal from earlier, what he was saving space for, the dessert, and Clove has to talk to keep herself here, just for a few more moments, just for a bit longer.

“Fuck, I loved holding that remote all night. You give me so much, baby, so much to play with, always so fucking eager to please. What if I rode you while that toy was still vibrating inside you, baby? Would you like that?”

Gale nods, moaning feverishly, and Clove reaches for a handful of his hair on the top of his head at the last second, a piece of him to hang onto. She gives it one firm tug, and Gale whines, and then his efforts redouble, yanking her down on top of him hard enough that his blunt nails scrape at her hips, and Clove tips into total oblivion with a broken wail.

When Clove comes to again, she is pitched forward on her elbows, panting hard, hips raised up off Gale’s head enough to give her a window looking down the length of his body. The view makes her breath catch.

“Gale,” she admonishes softly. 

Gale freezes, caught red-handed. Back arched off the bed, cock in hand, tense as a bow string and just as ready to snap–though, to his credit, very clearly trying not to. 

“I am sorry,” he gasps. “I cannot help it, I am, this is–” 

Clove scoots back down his body, tugs his hand away, and pins it with his other hand above his head. “I’ll help, then.” 

Gale’s eyes flutter shut, spine sinking back to the mattress, and he sighs. Relief. 

“Yeah, I’ve got you, baby. It’s been a long night of being held open, hasn’t it? You’ve been stretched for so long, waiting for this so long. You’ve given me so much tonight, my angel. You’ve been so fucking generous, to give me the remote and all the control I want over your hole and then your lovely fucking mouth, too. I just want one more thing from you, my love.”

Gale is beyond replying, eyes sealed shut and gone somewhere else, though she knows he’s still listening. 

“I want you to come in me, Gale,” Clove says softly as she notches him at her entrance and slides down onto him in one smooth motion.

“ Fuck!” Gale shouts, and he fights her grip on his wrists with real strength, utterly lost in it, too far gone to keep from writhing now. “You feel so good. It’s so much, fuck– more, Clove, give me more, turn it up–”

Clove’s eyes go round. “Are you sure?” 

“Yes, fuck, now, please, I need it,” he sobs, and Clove reaches for the remote, and hits the plus sign once. Gale cries out, thrashes, and nods all at once, and then she doesn’t make him wait anymore. Clove snaps her hips down maybe only ten times in quick succession, and Gale’s body snaps taut once more, and he comes with a hoarse yell, cock pulsing inside her, right where it belongs, and Clove only just remembers to stop watching his beautiful sun burnt face at the last second to scramble for the remote and turn the toy off before it suddenly becomes way, way, way too much.

“God, Gale, you’re fucking perfect. I love you. Thank you,” she whispers, stroking a few stray tears off his cheeks. When his eyes flicker open, he gives her a dazed smile, and reaches for a kiss. 

Clove gives him multiple before they tackle the tender but ultimately painless task of removing the toy, and then Clove gathers Gale in her arms for a real cuddle, one that will definitely last longer than five goddamn minutes, because both of them have gone entirely boneless.

“Does it feel strange without it now?” Clove whispers. 

“Yes. A phantom feeling, of sorts. It’ll go away soon, I’m sure.”

“Nothing hurts?”

“No.”

“Good.”

“Clove, that was… not an experience I’ll ever forget, having dinner with you like that.”

“Was the toy worth the nerves?”

“Yes. Worth every cent you spent on it too, I assure you, even for tonight alone.” 

Clove smiles, presses a kiss to his temple. “Mm. Vacation really is for exploring new things, huh?”

“More than I ever anticipated, yes.”

“Are we going to save further exploration for our next vacation?”

“No.”

Clove laughs softly. “You grow bolder by the day.”

Chapter Text

Clove and Gale did not ‘move in together’, so much as Gale spent three months living in Clove’s apartment while he sorted his life out post-implosion, and then he moved out, and Clove just… tagged along. When her lease was up six months later, they both knew it was pointless renewing it. She hadn’t spent a night there in months. It wasn’t so much a discussion, as a welcome inevitability.

There has been no fanfare about their living arrangements at all, really. From those first few months in Clove’s apartment to now, it has been decidedly lacking in drama. 

Gale cooks, and Clove does the dishes. Clove cleans incidentally; Gale cleans intentionally. Clove helps Gale in their garden–which is really his garden, but it’s cute that he insists on calling it theirs. Sometimes Clove gets depressed, and somewhat often Gale gets worried, and somewhere in the midst of all the bullshit they manage to find balance with each other, in each other, and it’s natural. Easy. 

Only one aspect of their shared life together makes Clove wince slightly to think about: secrets are more stressful in close quarters, and Clove has… a few secrets. Which is fine. She’s allowed her secrets. They’re not bad, not harmful, not malicious. Just the parts of herself she prefers to grow in private. 

And with Gale’s instrument.

She comforts herself with the thought that Gale would surely call it their instrument–this piano he bought not two months into owning this house.

A lovely little upright, nothing very extravagant in appearance, a bit old and beat up even, but certainly high quality in all the ways that count, and the first time Clove played it, she cried.

She’d had access to nothing but out of tune junk in the back warehouses of used piano stores or unlocked practice rooms her whole life. Well, the portion of it she’s played piano for, anyway, which is only around a third, and always in secret, always skirting the edge of what could be called learning.

She’s just messing around. She doesn’t actually know how to play, and that’s okay. This is just for her. 

Clove just has access to a particularly lovely piano now, and it so happens to be in the comfort of her own home, and she has found it is easier to simply not ponder what Gale’s reaction would be to the information that she has played his piano in his absence regularly for nearly two years. Especially as she plays his piano, which she does these days with increasing frequency.

I’m allowed my secrets, I’m allowed my secrets, I’m allowed my secrets–

“Clove?”

Clove jumps, whirls on the bench, and smacks her right knee so hard against the bottom of the piano that her eyes immediately water. “Fuck!”

She doesn't even peek at his face. Can’t. Couldn’t. Not for anything. Her gaze remains fixed firmly on his feet. 

Forest green socks. Grey stripe on the toes. Hovering just at the point where the kitchen tile becomes living room carpet. Rocking slightly back onto the heel, before the toes dig into the carpet like the foot version of a clenched fist. 

Clove’s knee throbs so loud she can’t think about anything else. She cradles it with both hands. 

“Fuck,” she repeats, closer to a squeak now. 

The silence is deafening. It stretches on and on and on, until Clove can’t even look at his feet anymore. She just looks at her own.

“I thought someone else was in our house,” Gale says finally. His tone is low and cold, and Clove knows he is well and truly angry with her. Gale’s fury is always quiet. 

“Nope. Just me.” 

“You have nothing else to say?”

Clove grinds her teeth together. “No.”

She hears him walk away. Behind her, the piano creaks of its own accord, like it too can feel the weight of the looming argument, the stress of an impending explosion.

Clove makes a break for the front door as soon as Gale is out of sight, slips her shoes on, and goes for a walk, throbbing knee be damned.

It’s not that she’s running away from her problems. It’s just that, well, she’s not entirely sure she’s actually ever made Gale this mad before. 

He doesn’t just… walk away. That’s not him.

And beyond that, Clove is angry too. Angry she got caught, angry her secret is out, angry this is an argument she’s been cornered into. 

Her hobbies are hers , and besides, she’s fucking seen Gale play piano. He had lessons. He started piano when he was fucking five.

The same age Clove was when she first took interest. 

The first time she asked.

The first time she was denied.

She can’t play fucking Mozart the way Gale can. She’ll never even come close, and playing for him would be humiliating, and she was perfectly within her rights to keep this to herself. 

Using Gale’s piano feels, admittedly, not as good. That part, she will apologize for. He bought it for himself. Any wear and tear she has caused is without his knowledge. She does feel a bit guilty about that. She has from the start.

But the rest?

She knew it would be, at the very least, displeasing to him. She does not feel bad. 

Her hobbies are hers.

By the time she makes it to the river, her blood is boiling, and hot tears flood her eyes.

Thank god for the river. Always a hiding spot, and always one that brings her peace. She calms slowly, with the help of bird calls and the familiar view and some pointless digging in the dirt with a stick. She ends up half hoping for a text from Gale–an olive branch, a scolding, a reassurance, anything at all–but she receives nothing. She stays at the river until sunset, then walks home in the comfort of the dark, counting her steps to keep from thinking about what awaits her, limping a little because her knee really does hurt.

When she slips through the front door, quiet as she can, Gale is nowhere to be found. Upstairs, the door to his study is shut. 

So Clove goes to bed alone, and hardly sleeps at all. 

She wakes after Gale has left for work, putters uselessly all day and doesn’t even so much as look at the piano, and is relieved by the distraction work provides that evening, even if it means standing on her aching knee all night.

Gale is waiting for her when she returns home. He’s seated on the piano bench, facing the keys, fingers trailing aimlessly but playing no notes. He doesn’t turn as she comes in the front door, heaves off her boots, and drops her bag with a thud. 

“Hey,” she says finally.

“Hello.” 

“You wanna talk?” 

“Yes.” 

Clove stops at the entrance to the living room, and crosses her arms. Sets her jaw. Digs her toes into the carpet. “Okay.” 

“You’ve played this whole time?” 

“Yes.” 

“Am I the only one who didn’t know?”

“You’re the only person who does know, as of yesterday.”

This gets him to turn around. His expression is one of confusion, but the pain simmering underneath it makes Clove’s throat tighten. 

“Why?”

Clove shrugs. “I keep it to myself.”

“That is not an answer.” 

“Look, I’m sorry for playing your piano. You bought it for yourself, and I’ve just been, like, taking advantage of that behind your back. I won’t do that anymore. But the rest is… not really up for debate.” 

Gale’s eyebrows shoot up. “The rest? What debate?”

“Well…” Clove hesitates, shifting her weight uncomfortably. “I won’t play for you. I still want to keep it to myself.” 

“And you’ve unilaterally decided that discussing any of this is unnecessary. That’s convenient.” 

Clove raises her chin an inch. “If it was wrong, I would apologize. I’m allowed to keep things to myself.” 

“You say ‘allowed’ like you expect that to dismiss the fact that actively concealing a hobby you participate in from me–a hobby I share with you, for Christ’s sake–for two entire years while living under the same roof is not incredibly strange and hurtful behavior.”

“Maybe it’s a little strange, but I don’t see how it’s hurtful,” Clove defends hotly, trying to ignore the tears already pricking behind her eyes.

“I find that difficult to believe. You are an emotionally intelligent person. If you can’t see it, I can only assume you’re being purposefully obtuse.”

“I’m not,” Clove snaps, making herself the first one to raise their voice, even if only slightly. She winces, and lowers it again. “Living together doesn’t mean I have to tell you every single thing about myself. I’m not a school topic for you to study until you’ve figured it all out. I’m a whole person, and if there are parts of me that I decide are just for me, that’s my fucking choice, no matter who I live with. Also, you said we share this hobby, but we don’t. Not really. I wasn’t, like, depriving you of connection or someone to talk to about it.”

Gale stares at her with unguarded astonishment. “What?”

Clove flinches, but doesn’t reply.

“I hardly know what I’m meant to make of that. I have never known you to lie to my face so blatantly, nor to miss every point I make so deliberately–”

“I’m not fucking missing anything!” Clove explodes in a window-rattling roar that sends Gale cringing back into the piano a little bit, and then the room goes abruptly as still and quiet as the doldrums.

After a few very long minutes, Tara is the one to break the stand still, because of course she is. She ambles into the living room, brushes against Gale’s legs only–as if to clarify her position in any fight they have ever had or ever will have–and then hops up onto the armchair in the corner, and settles in for a nap. 

Her presence seems to calm Gale. He stares at her curled up form while he organizes his thoughts.

“Clove, I heard you play piano yesterday,” he begins, slowly but not cautiously, “and you were not tapping out Chopsticks with two fingers. You were playing a song. You were playing a beautiful song, and you were playing it like you’ve been playing piano your whole life, like your fingers were designed for it. If I had not been so caught off guard, it would have certainly brought me to tears. So you must forgive me for being unwilling to accept your premise that we do not share a hobby. That is a bold-faced lie. It is simply untrue. If it were true, we would not be having this discussion, and yet here we are.”

Clove’s chest heaves painfully with unreleased sobs, and she has to look away while she collects herself. “I don’t play piano,” she mumbles miserably, not meeting his eye, not acknowledging any of his compliments or his assertions, barely upholding her end of having an argument.

“I don’t know what that means.”

“I just don’t play,” Clove says with a helpless shrug. “Not like you do.”

Gale gives an exasperated sigh. “The same blatant lie, over and over. Maybe you’re right, and this discussion isn’t worth having.”

Clove feels like a little kid, being scolded, being humiliated, and right on cue, a few tears escape down her cheeks. She scrubs them away viciously. “I don’t know what you want from me.”

“I want to understand.”

“What if I promise to never play piano again? Can we drop it, then?”

Gale is stunned into silence once more, jaw agape. “Clove, that is… the last thing I want,” he says finally, utterly disbelieving. “That would help nothing. I just want–look, if this is so very difficult for you to discuss, can you perhaps just help me understand one part of it? Can you give me just one singular piece of this puzzle?” 

Clove sniffles. “Which part?”

“Explain why you’re telling me you don’t play piano,” Gale says, and she can tell he’s trying to soften his tone, doing his absolute best to reason with her even though she has been nothing but entirely unreasonable. “I know you’re a sensible person, Clove. You know that what you were doing yesterday would be considered, by any other rational person, to be playing piano. To insist that you do not play piano is ludicrous, and I know that you know that. I’m not trying to–to insult your intelligence, or embarrass you, or trap you in a lie. Just… help me. Explain it. I know you must have your reasons. Please.”

Clove risks another glance at his face, and it’s a mistake. The pain is front and center now, clearing house, the most damning evidence of how deep the hurt she caused truly runs, and yet even now he is pleading with her, trying to guide them towards some sort of light at the end of the tunnel, throwing her lifeline after lifeline as she drags them resolutely downwards to the bottom of the ocean. 

Not because of anything Gale ever did or said. 

Just because of fucking Him, haunting her like a fucking ghost, the specter she’ll never stop seeing in the corner of her eye, and now, she realizes with dawning horror: his claws have left their marks on Gale, too.

No. You don’t fucking touch him.

Clove clenches her fists, digs her toes in, and stares doggedly at the wall behind Gale’s head. The sobs overtake her as soon as she opens her mouth, but there’s just no other way this is going to come out; she’s never said it to anyone before.

“I haven’t played my whole life. I first wanted to when I was–I don’t know, five or something. I asked my dad, because I was a stupid fucking kid and I didn’t know any better yet, and of course he just laughed at me, but then he never… fucking gave it up. He never stopped taunting me about it, or jeering at me because he caught me trying to sound out songs by ear because he wouldn’t even get me a book to try and teach myself with, and it’s not like he ever let me have money of my own, so I stole a book from a store once–first thing I ever stole, and I was only fucking eight, which is so fucked–but he found it, and–”

She’s cut off by a particularly harsh sob, and she can tell Gale’s expression is changing even though she’s trying not to look at it, so she looks down at her feet, wiping her nose on her sleeve, rallying herself.

“Anyway, I found a used piano shop when I was in my twenties. They let me use their shitty out of tune pianos in the back, and the only person ever back there was the tuner, and he was busy working–never even looked at me–so, I don’t know, he was fine. But I was–I was too embarrassed to go get one of those fucking kids books, and I didn’t think I’d really ever be able to learn it properly as an adult anyway. Everyone starts as a kid, you know? So I don’t–I don’t play piano. Not like you do. I can’t even read music. I just sound shit out. It takes me like a year to learn one song. It’s embarrassing, and I don’t like being embarrassed, so I don’t tell people, and I don’t play for people, because this is… mine. It’s just for me. I decided nobody’s going to fucking laugh at me about it again, and that’s… that.”

“Clove, how could I ever laugh at you?” Gale is hoarse enough that she knows he’s crying too now. “I would have to also wish to be outright cruel to you, and I know I am many things, but I hope at the very least I am not cruel. Nobody who heard you play yesterday would guess when you started playing, or that you can’t read music. They wouldn’t have a clue. I certainly didn’t.” 

Clove shakes her head again. “Doesn’t matter.”

“It doesn’t matter?” Gale repeats incredulously, voice finally raising in volume for the first time tonight. “Does it matter that it absolutely shattered me yesterday to discover that you hid such a special, breathtaking, clearly innate talent from me for the entire length of our relationship? Have I not at least earned the right to express how deeply that wounded me, regardless of why you did it?” 

Clove looks up, frowning, stomach twisting sharply at Gale’s use of the word shattered. “Why do you… I mean, I believe you, so don’t take this the wrong way, but why do you care so much?”

“Because I…” Gale trails off with a helpless wave of his hands, evidently so bewildered by this question that crafting an answer is borderline impossible. “Because I want to know you, Clove. That is the joy of being your partner. That’s why I’m here. I want to know what you care about, and what moves you, and what you would do with your time if you had an infinite amount of it, or if life was infinitely kind. I certainly know life hasn’t always been kind to you, but to take such a massive part of yourself and hide it away from me, not even allow me the privilege of simply knowing you play because you don’t trust me to allow you privacy when you want it, or to show you basic respect and decency… that makes me feel as if I have done something terribly, terribly wrong. If you are giving me only half of yourself, my experiences of being denied things in prior relationships can only inform me to believe that it’s because that’s all I’ve earned, and that is… painful, in and of itself, but then to know also that what I’m missing out on is something you love, when I love it too, and I love you… it–it breaks my heart.” 

This, at last, sends Clove spiraling out of control. She takes a step back, sobs wracking her body hard enough to hunch her over, almost too hard to reply, unable to see him anymore even if she wanted to, trapped in this miserable situation like a wounded animal with a shotgun pointed at its head. “Fuck, I’m–I’m sorry. I didn’t mean it like that. It wasn’t a punishment.”

“Clove, I know you didn’t mean it that way,” Gale says quickly, and she knows he’s trying to sound soothing now, but he also sounds like he’s talking to her from the surface of the water, and Clove is still on the ocean floor. “I know you didn’t, my love. I believe you. Can I hug you, please?” 

Clove shakes her head violently as she takes another step back, then immediately changes her mind and nods. “Please,” she croaks, and Gale’s approach is too quiet for her to hear, but she’s in his arms in what feels like less than half a second.

“Oh, Clove,” he murmurs into her hair. “It’s alright. We’re alright.”

It’s a little easier, struggling through getting words out when she’s hidden away like this, tucked into Gale’s shoulder. “It’s just, I always say I just don’t want him to fucking matter, and I wouldn’t… you know, like, if he ever showed up in my life again, I’d never let him anywhere fucking near you because I swore to myself I’d never let him hurt you, but now it turns out the whole time I was just… letting him do it anyway. It’s fucked up. I’m sorry.”

“He is always going to matter, Clove,” Gale says sadly. “He will always have been there for twenty years of your life, wielding cruelty as a weapon against you when you were at your most defenseless. You cannot wish away the scars he left you with, just as I cannot wish away Mystra’s, and I do not expect you to. I just don’t want it to mean that you hide yourself away from me. That does neither of us any good.” 

“It would just be fucking embarrassing.” 

“What would? Playing for me?”

“Yeah,” she hiccups. 

“Then don’t,” Gale says with a quiet sigh, disentangling himself from her so he can see her face again, both hands finding both of hers and clinging tight. “I’m not opposed to you having privacy, Clove. My intention was not to take that away from you, and the piano is, of course, yours to use as you wish. I would never begrudge you using it, even if you only do so when I’m not around to hear it. However, I do have a few things to say on the matter.”

“Yeah,” Clove mumbles. “Figured.”

Gale gives her a small smile, and squeezes her hands. “Well, first of all, I know you were given the wrong idea at a very impressionable age, but there is never any shame in learning. I feel a duty both as a professor and your partner to make sure you hear that from my lips.” 

Clove nods numbly, and reaches up with all their intertwined hands up to scrub more tears off her cheeks.

“Secondly, people learn to read music as adults all the time. People learn piano as adults all the time. The resources available to you are not all made for children, and you’re clearly musically inclined, so I really do think it would be a breeze for you. Not that you have to learn anything or do anything, but you were… perhaps intentionally misguided on the topic, and that was simply another record I needed to set straight.”

Clove looks at her feet, and nods again. “Okay.”

“Clove,” Gale says gently, tilting her face back up to him. “You do play piano. You play it beautifully. You can keep it to yourself for as long as you need or want to. I’ll never betray your secret, but I think you’re absolutely brilliant, and… I don’t want you to forget that.” 

Clove sniffles again, and forces herself to meet his gaze as evenly as she can. “I’m sorry I kept secrets. I know it was shitty, especially with… with how Mystra was and everything. I didn’t think about that. I’m really sorry. It was never because of you.” 

Gale smiles again. “Secrets, plural? How many hidden lives do you lead?”

“A few,” Clove says, braving a grin. “Well, only the two. I bet you could guess my other secret hobby, if you tried.” 

“At this point, I may as well guess horse archery. It would be equally as unexpected as yesterday’s discovery.”

“No, don’t think ‘surprised’. Think ‘yup, makes sense’. What makes sense for me to do, Gale?”

Gale’s brow furrows for a moment. “I feel as if I’m being set up to fall into some horrible trap.”

Clove rolls her eyes. “Oh, come on.”

A long pause. “Do you… work out?”

“What kind of work out, specifically?”

He hesitates once more, gnawing on his lip. “Weight lifting.” 

“Yeah. Got it in one. Well, two. I don’t do horse archery.”

Gale raises a brow with marked interest. “Is your weight lifting something I might be afforded the privilege of witnessing at some point?” 

“Why?”

“No reason at all. Plain old curiosity.”

“Pervert.”

Gale snorts, and shakes his head. “How long have you been doing that?”

“Not as long. Since I was thirty, maybe. You could watch, if you wanted. There’s a lot less baggage attached to it. I think it just always felt more like a coping mechanism than a hobby, and I like to do it at odd times, and then once you’re in the habit of keeping something to yourself, it’s just… easier to keep it to yourself. For me, anyway.”

“You do it at home?” 

“Yeah. I have weights. They’re in the garage. No idea how you never found them.”

“Hm. It might pay off for me to be a bit more observant.”

“Yeah, I mean, we could have had this fight ages ago. What were we even doing the last two years?”

“Being inefficient, I’d say.”

“You have anything else you wanna fight about real quick? We could have a two-for-one.”

“Not a thing. You?”

“Well, here, I don’t know if this is fight worthy, but I think you owe me a song. I played one for you yesterday, and I didn’t even mean to. Why were you even home that early, anyway?”

“My last meeting of the day had to cancel, but I got half a song at best.”

“Well, that’s on you. Could have been in stealth mode longer and gotten the whole song. You gave yourself up.”

“That I did. My surprise got the better of me. Speaking of, how’s your knee?”

“Sore, but fine. I do kind of want to sit, though. Been standing on it all night. Here, come on.”

Gale sits on the piano bench off center, clearly expecting her to sit beside him, but Clove tugs him back to the middle, and settles herself on the bench behind him instead, thighs bracketing his hips, arms wrapped around his waist, hands resting in his lap. She leans forward, chin on his shoulder, cheek resting against his.

“Play me a song, piano man,” she whispers. 

She feels rather than sees Gale’s smile.

“As you wish, piano woman.”

Gale starts playing, and Clove is grateful for the distraction, because though he cannot see her cheeks, she is afraid he would be able to feel the way they’re burning, with her face pressed up against his like this.

It’s a very silly thing to blush about, but he just said it so immediately, so casually, and since when is Clove a piano woman?

Well. She could be.

Or maybe, just maybe, she simply is.

She was the six year old all alone in the mall because her dad had fucked off to God knows where, wandering aimlessly until she stumbled upon a man playing some sort of ragtime waltz on a piano in the food court, and then she stood, utterly transfixed the whole way through, swaying with every swing of the notes, paying more attention than anyone else in the building, and she was still standing there, jaw on the floor and eyes like saucers, when he was done. The man noticed her, laughed kindly, and asked if she played. She ran away, embarrassed, but what she wanted to say was please please please teach me that song; I loved it so much; I didn’t know a song could be so fun. 

She was the eight year old who stole that damn book from a local music shop, manned only by the sweetest old lady who offered her a sucker and made her first theft far too fucking easy. She felt horribly guilty about it for years, and only made it halfway through teaching herself the notes before her dad found it and made her throw it out anyway. She still remembers the mnemonic device she learned for the notes on the little lines, though. Every good boy does fine. Couldn’t find the notes on a keyboard to this day, but she cared enough to remember the phrase anyway.

She was the twenty something who was brave enough to ask the piano shop for permission to play their pianos. Stubborn enough to muscle her way through learning entire songs by ear, one painstaking note at a time. Determined enough to show up, again and again, for no reason other than she fucking loved it. She has always loved it, even when the person who should have encouraged her relentlessly attempted to bully it out of her, when the tuning man was playing over her the entire time, when nobody cared, nobody listened, nobody knew.

Piano woman. Yeah. That’s her. Through rain or shine. She’s earned the title.

Gale’s song ends, and Clove squeezes him, pressing a kiss to his cheek. “Thanks,” she whispers, for many more things than just the song. 

“Mm, anytime. I think this may be my favorite way to play piano.”

“Yeah? I bet we could find better.”

He hums. “I would never dare doubt you.” 

Clove reaches out with one hesitant finger, and presses a key. “What key is this?” she whispers. 

“D.”

She hesitates. “The fourth line, right?” 

“What? Oh–for the treble clef? Yes! Though, that would be one octave up–” he plays the same note, eight keys up the board, “but yes, that is a D. How do you know that?” 

“Every good boy does fine,” she murmurs. “Only thing I managed to learn from that damn book.”

“You didn’t learn the keys they went with?”

“No, I didn’t get that far. It would have been so easy to look up; I just never did. Always too fucking bitter about it.”

“Well, if you know one, you know them all.” 

“Seven of them?”

“A through G.”

Another pause, then Clove plays another note. “A.”

“Yes, that’s right,” Gale says warmly.

“Hm.” 

“Hmm.”

“Piano woman,” Clove mumbles to herself, staring at the keys, feeling the familiar itch in her fingers, and, for the first time in her entire fucking life, the desire to play knowing someone else will hear her.

She wants Gale to hear, specifically. She wants to share all the same things with Gale that he wants to share with her–this piano, this hobby, this home, this life. 

Her fingers are playing before Gale can so much as tense in anticipation. 

The third song she ever learned, and her favorite. Her knee twinges with the reach to the sustain pedal, but it’s worth it for this song. Fast enough to be fun for her fingers but still wistful, light, airy, getting louder and softer in rolling waves that Clove tweaks every time she plays it, and she nails it this time–happiest she’s ever been with the end result by a mile.

It’s lovely being wrapped around Gale like this while she plays, too, because she is not forced to see whatever expression is on his face, but she can still feel how he experiences her song. The tensing and relaxing of his body, the little hitches in his breathing, the way the closer to the end of the song Clove gets, the more Gale presses himself back into her, like he’s trying to melt right into her chest.

In the final few measures, she finally gets a hint as to Gale’s expression: he sniffles. Clove smiles a little bit against his cheek, and he smiles back. 

“Clove, thank you,” Gale murmurs once her hands have landed in his lap once more.

Clove buries her face in his neck. “It felt nice.”

“Did it?”

“Yeah. I was always worried if I played with someone else around, it would suck all the joy out of it, you know? Like, I wouldn’t be thinking about how much I like the song, or how much I like moving my fingers fast, or how cool it is I can play a whole song; I’d just be thinking about how the person probably thinks I’m shit. But it didn’t feel like that. Just felt like… the joy of it was doubled, because you felt it too.”

“I did,” he whispers.

Clove kisses his neck. “Sorry I didn’t do this sooner. Sharing things with you is always easy. I don’t know why I thought this would be different.”

“Well, as I’ve very recently learned, you did have your reasons.” 

Clove snorts. “Yeah. Hey, can I ask you a personal piano question? Promise you won’t take it the wrong way.”

“A reasonable request, when I have yet to hear the question.” 

Clove nips his ear playfully. “I just don’t want you to think I’m complaining. I fucking love this piano–wouldn’t change it for anything, but… I feel like you could have gotten something more… expensive? Grand? You’re kind of loaded.” 

“If you didn’t want me to take your question the wrong way, you could have tried phrasing it more diplomatically. You could have, for instance, instead said that my choice struck you as intentional–”

“Oh my fucking god. Yeah, I’ll just never ask another question again, thanks.”

Gale laughs. “The choice was intentional. It reminds me of the piano I played growing up. It was my grandmother’s, and was passed down to my mother, and she passed–well, it… it just reminds me of it,” he finishes lamely, sentence cut short by a clearly shame-filled secret of his own. 

Clove feels a twinge of nausea. She can already see where this is headed, could probably piece it together herself well enough, but… maybe they’re both better off not keeping any secrets. 

“Passed it on to who?”

“To me,” Gale admits quietly. “It did not survive my residence in Mystra’s house. She hated it, and sold it against my wishes. I came home one day, and it was just…”

Gone.

“Fuck,” Clove whispers.

“I never should have brought it into that house. I should have known better.”

“You couldn’t have known.” 

Gale doesn’t argue, but he doesn’t agree. 

“Did your mom take it hard?”

“Less hard than I did.”

Clove feels her chest contract, clenching around the little knot of pain she feels every time Gale talks about his time with Mystra, like she swallowed more grief than she could chew. “I’m so sorry, lover.” 

“Oh,” Gale sighs, shaking his head. “It’s alright. I was fortunate enough to find one similar to it, and hopefully whoever bought that one has treated it well. This piano is much more well loved even than I knew, and that’s… rather special, in a way.”

Clove reaches out to brush her fingers over the keys, and is briefly overwhelmed by a wave of pure hatred, suddenly filled with so much bitterness she can taste it on her tongue. “Fuck both of them for trying to ruin piano for us. It shouldn’t be that painful of a thing to love.”

“We’re still here, aren’t we?” Gale says softly, squeezing her hand in his lap.

Clove’s red hot anger is gone as quickly as it appeared, zapped away by Gale’s boundless, gentle optimism. “Yeah, we are,” she says with a small smile. “Against the odds.”

“Rather significant odds, might I add. And I would say, if anything, with our newfound ability to enjoy piano together, we will only enjoy it more, in spite of those who may have once wished otherwise.”

“Yes,” Clove says emphatically. “In fact, we really should enjoy it as much as we possibly can. For the vindication of it, you know?  It’s healthy.” 

“Certainly. You have ideas for how to enjoy it to its maximum potential, I’m assuming?”  

“Yeah, definitely. The first idea is that I don’t use that fucking pedal again, because goddamn that made my knee throb.” 

Gale brushes her knee lightly with two fingers, frowning. “Would you like an ice pack?” 

“Um, maybe, actually? Yeah.” 

Gale brings her a gel ice pack and a towel, and helps her secure the ice pack to her mostly straightened knee.

“Do you still want me in front of you?”

“Yes. But strip first.”

Gale freezes for only maybe three seconds, then quickly does as she says and settles back in on the bench without a word, and Clove hums happily.

“I want you to play for me again,” she murmurs as her hand lands on his stomach, and Gale jumps like he got electrocuted. 

Clove is confused for only a moment, and then she laughs. “The ice pack! Fuck, sorry. It’ll warm up.”

Gale shivers, then relaxes as her hand wanders up his chest. “Are you going to make playing difficult for me? Is that your plan to further our mutual enjoyment?”

“Oh, absolutely,” Clove mutters darkly. “Have you ever played with your eyes closed, Gale?”

“My eyes closed?”

“Yeah. There must be a song or two you’ve played enough times that the muscle memory could get you through, right?”

Gale swallows. Clove kisses his throat.

“I think whatever reason you had for asking me to take my clothes off will be distracting enough.”

“Oh, I don’t know; you’re pretty fucking good at piano, lover.”

The more gentle approach works perfectly. It’s gratifying to peek at his lap and watch him grow half hard at the compliment; feel the little pleased shudder that runs down his spine. It gives Clove an idea, actually, and she moves her hand back onto the ice pack. 

“Open your legs for me, baby,” she whispers, widening her own legs to give him space. “Wide as they’ll go.” 

He whimpers, but slowly, ever so slowly, he obeys. He makes it about forty five degrees, then pauses, waiting for Clove to hum her encouragement, as if she might let him get away with only going halfway. Finally, Gale’s legs hit the bench, his spine arches slightly, and he immediately begins to shake a little.

Clove is never going to enjoy a piano this much ever again. 

“Close your eyes.” 

“Can I put my hands on the keys first?” 

“Sure.”

Gale positions his fingers, and Clove checks to make sure his eyes are closed.

“Good boy,” she coos, and then she drags the tips of three frigid fingers up the inner length of his thigh. 

Ten notes ring out in discordant unison, and underneath the deafening cacophony, Clove can just make out Gale’s forceful expletive.

He keeps shivering as the shock wears off, and Clove wraps him in a one-armed hug as her other hand returns to the ice pack. His legs closed a little in reaction to the cold, so Clove throws her left leg over his and drags it back to the bench, trapping it there under her thigh. 

Gale adjusts his right leg for her, but he whines as he does it. “You cannot possibly expect me to play an entire song like this.”

“No, of course not.” Clove lifts her not-chilled hand to her face, licks it, then reaches down and wraps it around the base of his cock. “I want you to play like this.” 

Gale’s breathing speeds up. “I, ah–”

“You can do it, baby. Focus for me.”

His fingers twitch on the keys, but he doesn’t start playing. Clove reaches up with two freezing fingers and rolls his right nipple between them. A few more notes are hit by accident, but for all his writhing and bitter complaints, she can still feel his cock hardening further as she strokes it lazily. 

Her other hand returns to its resting place on the ice pack, Gale heaves a shaky breath, and after a few fumbled starts, begins to play. 

Clove should have known Gale could play a song with his eyes closed, wrapped up in her arms and mid-hand job. Her Gale, always willing to show off, ever eager to impress, and so very talented.

Clove’s not even jealous anymore.

She relishes every missed note when her freezing fingers find a new landing place–his throat, his cheek, his navel, his right leg as she nudges it back into its place. She admires the flexing muscles in his forearms, his violent shivering intermixed with the constant but gentle trembling of his spread legs, his soft little moans. She loves his music, his determination, him. She’d share anything with him, if he asked, if he truly wanted her to. And he always, always does. 

Around halfway through the song, Clove slips her icy fingers into his mouth, and this brings the performance to a screeching halt as Gale whimpers, his hips buck, and his hands fly off the keys to reach for any part of Clove he can find and hold on to–her left thigh, her hair, her cheek. 

“Shh, baby. Keep playing for me, lover. Please, for me. I love listening to you. Please.”

Her voice is a low plea, almost a moan, and she lets it break slightly on the second please, and she thinks for a moment by the way Gale’s back arches that he’s going to come on the spot, but he reins it in. He opens his mouth wider, and Clove lets her fingers slip out so he can talk.

“Can I open–I need to see to find my place again, please,” he rasps. 

“You moved your hands, not me. You can figure it out.” 

Gale whines, and he thrashes his head back, turning to nip at her ear in frustration. His left hand kneads harshly at her thigh. “Clove.” 

Clove’s warm hand halts its movements, and two re-frozen fingers land on the base of his exposed throat. “I can wait.”

Gale groans, defeated, lifts his head, and reaches tiredly for the piano once more. It takes him a long couple of minutes, and she can tell by how still his body goes just how intensely he is focusing. His fingers grope blindly at the keys before feeling out their proper resting spot, and only then does Clove resume her slow stroking.

“Oh, look at you. So fucking smart. Good boy. Play your song for me, baby.”

Gale struggles more through the second half, and even his perfectionism gives way to his desperate need to finish, in both senses of the word, and the missed notes begin to go uncorrected. 

Clove dips her head to taste the sweat that’s collecting in the dip of his collarbone, drags her entire frigid palm up the inside of his already violently shaking thigh, and moans her encouragement. 

“Fuck, Clove, I can’t–” Gale whimpers as his song briefly devolves into a mess of random notes. 

“You can. You can do it. You’re so fucking close, baby. Don’t give up now.”

“I am close, I’m–”

“Finish the song first,” Clove murmurs, slowing her hand on his cock. “Focus, my angel.” 

Gale tosses his head back once more, burying his face in her neck with a grunt. He grinds out maybe half the correct notes in the last twenty seconds of his performance, arms glistening with sweat and twitching with effort, accompanied beautifully the whole way through by the low constant groan in his chest, and then his teeth sink into the base of her neck as he hits the final note.  

“Fuck yes, good job, now come for me baby,” Clove gasps, hand picking up speed rapidly as she reaches to press two ice cold fingers to his taint, and Gale’s whole body arches so hard as he starts to come that he nearly pushes Clove backwards off the bench.

Both his hands wind frantically into her hair as he covers Clove’s hand with warm stickiness, and then her cold fingers retreat, and his body finally sags into her. 

“Fuck,” he pants. “Fuck, that was a lot.” 

“Yeah, jesus, you are… so fucking impressive,” Clove says, voice husky as she looks hungrily down the length of him–her cum-covered hand and his spent cock and his still spread legs. “How’d you do that, lover? God, I–”

Gale moves so quickly that Clove starts. He untangles from her, slides off the bench, whirls, and settles himself on his knees right between her legs. He’s already working on her pants.

“You’re going to do it too.”

Clove stares at him. “What?” 

Gale tugs at her pants, and she lifts her hips as best she can to allow him to slide them down her thighs. “You don’t have to close your eyes. I’d rather you be able to see me, but you’re going to play me a song too.”

Suddenly back in his field of view, suddenly the only one with unsatisfied desire raging in her veins, exposed and vulnerable and suddenly… not in control. Clove’s confidence shatters, and panic begins to claw its way up her throat.

“Gale, I’m not–I can’t.”

“Of course you can.”

She shakes her head with increasing distress. “I’m not as good at–”

“Clove,” Gale cuts her off in a voice more commanding than she’s ever heard, and at the same moment, his fingers press into the crease of her thigh.

Clove yelps, and a shudder passes through her from her toes to her scalp. She hadn’t even seen his hand move for the ice pack. Gale smiles wickedly, and then he picks up her messy hand and licks her fingers clean–a satisfied little smack after every one.

“Play for me. Now.”

Oh.  

Clove goes dizzy.

This is how Gale does the ridiculous things she puts him up to: everything else ceases to matter. The only thing that matters is the simple fact that she has to.

What use is confidence when you have no choice? 

Having no choice is also desperately, wildly, unbearably hot, and Clove suddenly doesn’t give a fuck about the rest of it. Her mind stalls for a second trying to recall a song to play, and Gale refreshes the cold of his fingers only to press them into her folds, and she squeaks. 

“Fuck! Okay, I’m–I’m going.” Her fingers find the keys, and then she freezes again with another wave of panic. “Gale, I only know songs that use the pedal.” 

“Does it matter?” Gale asks as he raises a brow at her, and then his fingers warm rapidly as he presses them inside her. 

Clove’s hips roll towards him of their own volition, but her brow furrows stubbornly. “Well, yes? I mean, they’ll sound weird without it.”

Gale appears to be biting back a laugh as he nudges her clit with the tip of his nose and curls his fingers inside her. “Clove, my dearest beloved, does it matter?”

No. No, it does not. 

Clove plays the first song she ever learned this time, because it’s both the easiest and the shortest, and Gale doesn’t know that.

Gale does not bury his face in her cunt as soon as she starts playing, as she expected. And hoped. Instead, he just hovers close, occasionally nuzzling her thighs or her hair or her clit. Mostly, he is just watching her face, and there’s nowhere to hide from him now, not even when he starts fucking talking.

“Well done, my love. Look at you, playing a song for me with my fingers inside you, and it sounds beautiful,” he pauses, and Clove isn’t looking but she can hear the smirk as he continues, “even without the pedal.”

Clove wraps her left leg around his shoulders with vengeance, trying to drag him into her and shut him up, but he doesn’t budge. She’s still correcting all her missed notes, but only barely.

“I love you so much, piano woman,” he continues in an impossibly soft croon. “Do you want my tongue?” 

She nods frantically, because talking would be too much; there’s not enough space left in her brain for that–

“Tell me, my love.”

Clove whines, shakes her head, loses the thread of the song completely for a moment and scrambles to find it again, and Gale just waits. 

Every muscle in Clove’s body is burning with the warring desire to give in and hold her ground. Is this how Gale feels?

Gale reaches up to knead her left breast with one very chilled hand, and Clove shivers hard, then breaks. “Please, fuck, please–”

It’s something like a miracle that her song sounds anything like a song with Gale’s tongue lapping insistently at her clit, his fingers moving with practiced precision inside her, still humming encouragement for her, eyes still fixed on her face. Clove meets his gaze, just for a moment, as she stumbles across the finish line. 

“Oh my god Gale, Gale, Gale,” she gasps, and pitches forward, the ice pack slipping off her knee as she bends it unintentionally, fingers still on the keys and hitting the loudest chord of the night. 

Gale only scoots closer as he slips his fingers out of her, tugs her left leg closer to himself, and sinks his forehead down onto it with an exhausted, shaky, contented sigh. 

His hair is a little sweat damp, and Clove smiles as she runs a hand through it. “Goddamn,” she whispers. “I’ve definitely never enjoyed piano that much.”

Gale laughs, looking up at her with eyes that are wide and watery and absolutely brimming with love, and Clove’s breath catches in her chest.

“Me neither,” he says softly.

“You can do that whenever you want, by the way. We don’t have to have just had a fight.”

“I can assure you that was not provoked by any lingering anger–quite the reverse, actually–but I will… keep that in mind.” 

“Gale, thank you for–for all of it. I really can’t tell you how much all of this…”

Gale struggles wearily to lift himself on his no doubt aching knees, reaches all the way up her torso, and cups the back of her neck to drag her down and into a kiss. Clove moans softly. 

“Everything about you is unexpected, and every surprise makes me love you more deeply than ever. I wouldn’t want to be kept so diligently on my toes by anyone else.”

“I think I actually do a much better job of keeping you on your knees, piano man."

Chapter Text

(1) In hindsight, three glasses of wine on a quiet Tuesday night in was a little suspect. Pointed. It must be one hell of a question Gale’s been tip-toeing around for the last forty minutes, flushed from the wine and the embarrassment both and barely able to look her in the eye, hand on her thigh since they sat down next to each other on the couch and still squeezing like his life depends on it, his silly achy knees knocking together every two seconds with all his squirming.

Clove settled for a finger of whiskey and called it a night, so she’s not even tipsy enough to assume the question is anything too terribly dramatic, even for all his fanfare. A Gale marriage proposal would not happen on a quiet Tuesday night in, and he wouldn’t get drunk for it. She already lives here. He can’t be pregnant. Ha.

“Are you pregnant or something?” 

It makes him laugh as much as she hoped it would. Shakes out some of those jangling nerves. Not enough of them, though. As soon as the giggles fade, he’s back to squeezing, squirming, squinting at the hardwood, and as adorable as he is, Clove has had enough. 

She swings a leg over him and settles herself firmly in his lap, forcing his stupid knocking knees into stillness. She cradles both sides of his head. “Gale.”

“Yes?”

“Out with it.”

Overwhelming him physically works. As usual.

“I want you to fuck me.” 

It’s… odd. Clove has wanted this for a long time. Long before she ever played with his ass. She has fantasized about it endlessly, while with him and alone, for years. For as long as she has known him, she has wanted, because of course she has. It’s Gale. What else is she going to do?

A fantasy is not reality, though. It comes with none of the practicalities. None of the hang-ups, and now they intrude upon her consciousness in a tsunami.

Reality requires… equipment. How do they choose that? What is she going to look like with a cock attached to her? Is she going to like it? Is he? What if she hurts him? What if she’s bad at it? He’s waited this long to ask, nearly four months of using the plug she got him with enthusiasm and ever increasing frequency, and then it still took three glasses of wine to get it out. This is important to him. 

What if she fucks it up? 

Panicking seems like an awfully good way to fuck it up right from the very start.

Luckily, the whole world seems to conveniently stop spinning for a moment while Clove processes, and even more fortunately, Gale’s face is inches from hers.

Gale. Her Gale. The person she wants to do this for, and get it right for. She focuses so hard on his lovely wine-tinted face she has no space left to focus on the ringing in her ears, or her suddenly sweaty palms, or her buzzing brain. 

By the time the world starts spinning again, Clove is–outwardly, at least–having an appropriate reaction. For him. She’ll handle her own shit later.

“Yeah?” she says, husky like she intended. 

“Yes.”

“That little toy isn’t enough for you anymore?”

Gale lifts his chin an inch. Defiant, even though she can feel his cock hardening underneath her. “No.”

“Of course not,” she murmurs. “My needy little slut is never satisfied. Had to get drunk just to ask if I could fill him properly.” 

Gale whimpers, and she reaches a generous hand down to palm his cock, rewarding all his bravery and entirely ignoring her own lack of it, and drags him into a filthy kiss.

They’re finally doing this, then.

(2) Clove isn’t much of a shopper. It’s half the reason she wears the same clothes all the goddamn time. Shopping is exhausting, and expensive, and fucking stressful.

Being in a sex shop doesn’t exactly make it better. A sales assistant has been stalking them since they walked in the door–at a polite distance, of course, but very much fucking watching, and Clove wants to crawl out of her own skin about it. Gale can sense her discomfort, and he shields her when he can, and keeps his voice low, but still, the whole experience grinds her down to a fine powder.

The strap-on is the simple part–primarily because Gale takes the reins for it, at Clove’s gentle but insistent encouragement. He picks one with easy, swift confidence, before the sales assistant can even chime in to give their unsought opinions on the subject. Modestly sized, black–to suit Clove’s tastes, no doubt–and only subtly textured. 

Clove has no such luck with the harness. This decision was always going to land more naturally on her shoulders, and she really should have an opinion about it, but she secretly wishes Gale would just tell her which one is his favorite so they can be done with it. Alas, he refuses. He wants her to choose this time.

She dawdles long enough that the sales assistant feels the need to stick their nose in, and then she more or less runs away like a fucking coward while Gale chats politely with them. Gale has to come find her, in the end, and drag her back from where she was pretending to look at wands.

Back to hell.

The only harness she has a mild preference for, she won’t even allow herself to look at. 

For one thing, she managed to discreetly peek at the price tag, and it’s obscene. The price one pays for leather. Secondly, it’s not fucking black. At least, not entirely. It’s accented dark purple. 

Why the fuck would Clove not choose something all black? Gale even picked the strap-on in her permanent color preference; she can’t go and choose something else now. She’s just being fucking weird. That’s all this is, so now she’s spending almost all of her time trying not to look at the only thing on the rack she actually wants to look at. Like a normal person. 

The sales assistant can probably smell the uncertainty on her from twenty feet away.

It’s worse, too, because she has this constant, nagging sense that a few months ago, she would not have had this issue–or at least, one of them. She would have known exactly what Gale would like, at the very least. A guiding light. A lifeline. She would have picked something to his tastes in a few seconds, natural as anything, because she has been his partner for well over two years, and she knows him, just as he knows her, and generally, they operate in smooth synchronicity, secure in that knowledge. Since when does a decision like this make her feel like she is shopping in front of someone who will be utterly and irreparably devastated when she inevitably makes the wrong choice?

Clove needs to shake this. She needs to let it go. Since when does she overthink everything like this?

The next harness she catches Gale looking at, she feigns interest in. 

It’s black. Nylon. Lots of buckles. Clove can understand why it drew Gale’s interest, even if she can’t really imagine herself in it. At least it’ll mean this is over. It’ll work. It’s fine. And luckily for Clove, she’s a competent liar.

With their important decisions behind them, they move on to smaller and less expensive purchases, and the sales assistant loses interest, and Clove shakes off her little funk. She’s just in a sex store with Gale, giggling and cracking jokes and sneaking a handful every once in a while, foot off the gas of their little plan, browsing flavored lubes just to browse lubes, and all in all, it’s a pretty cute little date.

(3) We don’t have to do anything yet. We can save it for a special night. I just want to see you in it.

Clove more or less glares at herself in the mirror. She requested privacy for her first time putting it on, as strange as it sounded coming from her own mouth. Gale tilted his head about it, but acquiesced without a fuss.

It’s probably at least partially just the fact that Clove does not ‘dress up’ to look sexy. Ever. Lingerie, costumes, harnesses. Not even a fucking dress. None of it has ever felt very her, and at some  point it all started to scare her just for the simple fact that she’d never done it before, and looking at herself now, she knows this is… meant to be arousing. Clove knows that, in theory. It’s just not arousing. Not for her. 

As much as she’d never admit it out loud, it’s just not the harness she wanted. It looks like it should be her style in every single regard, and yet it still manages to be all wrong. The straps are too narrow, and the black carries none of its usual comfort, and she doesn’t like the way the buckles look, and she’s never seen herself with a cock before, but at the moment, it’s making her a little nauseous. 

She tugs her hoodie back on, as ridiculous as it seems, just to see if it makes her like what she sees more. There’s little improvement beyond hiding a couple of the straps, and Gale will think it’s ridiculous, so she takes it back off.

Gale might think she looks ridiculous, regardless. She swallows the urge to take it off, and calls gruffly for him to come in instead. Might as well get it over with. She doesn’t face him as he enters, because it feels much easier to just watch his reaction in the mirror. More indirect. A glass buffer between her and the shame.

Her reflection’s eyes meet his for a brief moment, and then his gaze travels very obviously downwards, and his expression thaws quite a lot of Clove’s very frosty feelings towards this harness. In fact, she’s forgotten what it looks like while still looking dead at the mirror. Doesn’t matter anymore.

Only thing that matters is that Gale is very clearly into it, to a degree Clove has never before inspired by just standing still and doing nothing. She feels, for the first time since putting the harness on… a hint of power. Gale stalks over to her slowly, as quiet as he’s capable of moving, and reaches out to grope her bare ass with one greedy hand.

“Fuck,” he whispers.

“You like it?” she breathes.

Gale runs his fingers over the strap that wraps around her hip, follows it down and around, circling her like she’s his prey. Clove shivers, and then his fingers pause, just shy of the cock.

“Can I…” Gale drifts off, voice cracking a little, and swallows. “This may be… off putting. I’m not sure, and I also know I said we didn’t have to do anything, but have you ever had the desire to see me give a blowjob, Clove?” 

All that anxious energy finds a new outlet, a new tributary flowing straight to her cunt, every thought drowned out by a wave of pure desire.

“Yes,” she says, very nearly a growl with how much she means it, and then it’s Gale’s turn to shudder.

He leaves her for a moment, and she’s nearly ready to burn the whole world down about it by the time he returns with a pillow, drops it at her feet, and sinks to his knees on it, and oh, she can see them in the fucking mirror.

Clove already knew Gale looks incredible from the back, but him on his knees, in front of her like this, still fully dressed and with her hand clutching the back of his head already, not to drag him closer, just to have something to hold on to. Clove can feel her slick seeping down her inner thighs already, just from the sight in the mirror alone, and there’s no hiding it in this get-up.

“Take your shirt off,” she orders hoarsely. Gale obeys, and Clove groans a little. “God, you look…” 

“Like I am yours?” Gale purrs, collecting a sample from her thigh and sucking the taste off his finger. “Entirely, and gratefully?” 

Clove refuses to acknowledge the tears pricking behind her ears. “Go on, then,” she says roughly. Her put-on indifference only makes Gale smile, and then he obeys once more.

The sight is incredibly hot, even if it’s a bit disorienting to have Gale’s mouth doing something Clove cannot physically feel. That’s easily offset, though–his glistening lips and the cock disappearing between them, a little deeper with every bob of his head; the tireless working of his jaw visible all the way up in his temples; his back muscles flexing and twitching in the mirror. By the time he’s worked himself down to the base–and he does work himself all the way down to the base, with astonishing speed–he is pushing two fingers up into her throbbing cunt, and Clove’s knees immediately begin to wobble.

“Christ, why are you so good at this? God, baby, you’re taking it so well already, just here on your knees for me and I didn’t even ask, fuck– how?”

Gale looks up, eyes watery and wide and oceans deep, answering all her questions, vocalized or not. For you. For you. Just for you.

At this, Clove’s hips move for the first time. Just a tiny, shallow, utterly unintentional thrust. Gale makes a surprised noise in the back of his throat, adjusts his positioning, then looks back up at her, and nods eagerly. 

Panic rises in her throat like bile, but she was the one to suggest it, even if she didn’t mean to. No backing out now. She holds his gaze for a few moments longer, then averts her eyes to the mirror, choosing to watch only her hand on the back of her head as she begins, in very awkward, uncertain strokes, to fuck Gale’s mouth. 

Gale feels her floundering, and he helps her, because of course he does. He withdraws his fingers from inside her, reaches them around to grab her ass instead, evening out her rhythm while his other hand grips one of the straps on her hip to gently guide her thrusts, and any remaining awkwardness is drowned out by the slew of filthy fucking noises he starts making as he more or less fucks his own mouth.

You’d think she was fucking him already. You’d think she really worked him up prior to this, maybe even put him up to it as a punishment, or a humiliation, or, she supposes, in his eyes, a gift. You would think she felt like a god in this harness. You would think anything other than the shameful truth, which is that Clove hates the harness, and Gale came in here and sank to his knees about it anyway, and she let him.

Gale finally makes himself choke, and Clove knows he did it, not her, because she barely participated in most of that, really.

He pulls off with a hoarse cough, and Clove is about to sink down to her knees along with him, but he has other ideas–fingers already frantically ripping at the buckles, tugging, pulling, nearly to the point of pain. The harness only comes half off before he gives up, and she feels the still wet cock dangling against her thigh as Gale sinks his face into her cunt like he can’t wait a second longer. 

Clove slams her eyes shut, then; listens, feels, loses herself in it, this very familiar and comforting warm mouth enveloping her clit, sucking on her like she is much tastier than silicone. Behind her eyelids, though, she still sees him sucking her–the cock, the tears on his cheeks near the end, the loving gaze steadily fixed on her face, the devotion written over every inch of him. She comes to that image, probably sears it on her eyelids permanently in the process, and a wave of shame rolls through her just behind it, just as Gale leaves her cunt to rest his head wearily against her thigh. 

No, it’s not over. That’s not it.

“Fuck, Gale, get on the bed,” Clove rasps, removing the harness fully, and Gale scrambles to obey on his clearly stiff knees.

Straddling him on the bed feels instantly soothing. Here, she knows what the fuck she is doing. Here, she knows beyond a doubt she belongs. 

“Did you like that?” Gale chokes out as she sinks down on him in one smooth motion, no hesitations, no waiting.

He doesn’t even fucking know. You didn’t make him know.

This finally makes her cry, tears welling beyond her control, and she hopes she can pass it off as sheer overwhelm. “Yes, fuck, I loved it. Thank you, my angel. You’re so fucking good at that. So fucking hot, so good for me. Thank you.” 

Gale relaxes, then, sinking into the mattress, as soothed by the familiarity as she is, and she fucks him as good as she’s capable of–which is still pretty fucking good.

After, he gropes for her hand blindly on the mattress, like he so often does, and lifts it to his lips.

“I’m glad to be doing this with you,” he whispers into her knuckles.

“Me too,” she whispers back–a lie and an absolute fact, hot enough in her mouth either way to make a few more tears slide down cheeks. She nudges Gale insistently until he gets the message and curls up to be her little spoon, and that’ll have to do to hide the tears, for now.

(4) A special night.

Three little words, used so casually Gale has probably forgotten he said them, especially given what followed them, but they have been haunting Clove more and more with every night that’s passed since.

How fucking special, exactly?

Clove is not a planner of grand gestures. Her love isn’t quiet, exactly; it just lives in the loud but simple moments, in the unsubtle touches and the protective instincts and constant silly cheap gifts that she only bought because she just so happened to spot something that reminded her of Gale. She does not plan extravagant dates; she does not organize elaborate surprises; she just does not perform romance in the incredibly fairy tale way that Gale seems to enjoy performing it. She lives her life, and loving Gale is just a naturally ingrained part of it. Easy as breathing.

Gale is the master of grand gestures. Gale is the one who could make a night unforgettable if he wanted to. He would be excited by the opportunity, probably, but if Clove is the one fucking him, if she’s in charge, shouldn’t she be the one responsible for making it special?

It’s unfortunate, then, that she has no clue what the fuck she’s doing, and that every day that slips by with the (mostly) unused gear burning a hole in their nightstand, she grows progressively more stressed about it. 

She books three separate dinner reservations, one after another, and cancels all three. Making him dinner is off the table, flat out. She considers buying flowers, but that feels inadequate. She very briefly considers a trip, but that makes her brain feel like it’s been dipped in acid, so she abandons that idea even quicker than the rest.

All this unvented stress culminates in the most humiliating fashion possible: Clove having a panic attack about it while at work. Can’t exactly explain the situation, but can’t work either, so Mama K shoos her out the back door with a hug and a concerned look and tells her to smoke a bowl when she gets home.

Lying to Gale is, again, too fucking easy. 

Bad day. Bad customers. Not enough sleep.

So Gale packs her bowl for her, and that makes her feel even worse.

Late in the night, long after Gale has fallen asleep, Clove books an online dinner reservation at the first restaurant she originally booked one with, tells herself to go buy some fucking flowers, hits the bowl again, and goes to sleep thinking about what a fucking tragedy of a disappointment she is.

(5) “Are you ready?” she asks, soft as she can, one hand trailing down his spine. 

Gale nods, brow furrowed and eyes squeezed shut, face bright red where it’s not smushed into the mattress. He doesn’t appear altogether the most ready to get fucked for the first time that Clove has ever seen anyone look–not that she has a very solid frame of reference, or any frame of reference at all. He wiggles his ass at her when she hesitates, though, invites the proceeding smack and smiles a little when it lands. Alright, maybe he’s more ready than she thought. Maybe she’s overthinking this. She’s been doing that a lot, recently. 

Even having put the plug in him countless times by now, it’s still strange applying pressure when she can’t feel the resistance around her fingers. It feels like she’s going in blind, even though she can very much see what she’s doing. Stretching him, disappearing into him, inch by slow inch–

“Breathe,” Clove says gently, pausing when half of the cock’s inside him, and Gale sucks in a ragged breath, but the muscles in his back remain rigid beneath her hand. “Are you okay?”

He nods–a quick, jerky little thing. 

He’s fine, he’s fine, he’s fine. Overthinking it.

Clove pushes again, and this time, the sight is much more intoxicating. Her hips getting closer and closer, so very nearly pressed into his ass, the cock nearly gone, god, Christ, “Gale, oh, fuck–”

“Ah, fuck, um–strawberry.”

It’s less like ice water, and more like a bomb going off. It was just a squeak, really, so quiet she nearly drowned him out, but still somehow loud enough to make her ears ring. Now her brain is buzzing like the worst head high she’s ever had, like it fell asleep as soundly as her arm when she lays on it wrong and now she’s waking her whole static-y conscience up at once. Yet still, over everything, over all of it, she can still hear herself crystal clear.

Don’t panic. You can’t panic. Not now. You can’t fuck up again. All this work to get here and you still did it wrong. Do this part right.

“I have to pull out, okay?” she tells him quietly, from somewhere near Neptune. “I’ll go slow.”

Gale nods, a little steadier, and exhales through his nose the whole way through. Clove unclasps the harness, throws it across the bed like it burned them both, and lays down carefully next to him. On her stomach, one cheek in the mattress, face to face. His huge fuck-up of a mirror. 

“Hey.”

Gale smiles at her, and despite everything, he still manages to look a little goofy. “Hello.” 

“Are you in pain?”

“No, not at all. Can you come closer?” 

Clove scoots forward a few measly centimeters with no small amount of uncertainty, and Gale closes the gap with no uncertainty at all. He nudges her onto her side, throws a leg over her hip, and sighs. 

Gale seems utterly content to just breathe with her. Clove tries to copy him, but this hardly feels like breathing.

Fucked it up, fucked it up, fucked it up. 

“Clove,” he whispers. 

“Yeah?”

“You’re shaking the bed.”

Oh. Her foot is bouncing. She hadn’t noticed.

“Sorry,” she mutters, forcing herself into stillness and going even more tense with the effort.

“Are you alright?”

“Of course. Are you?” 

“Yes. I’ve been having a little think about it.”

“Oh.”

“I think that position was no good. Even when you were just resting there, before you pushed, it made me feel claustrophobic. You are, well, an awfully large and forceful presence, and that much weight bearing down on me in such a vulnerable way, when I couldn’t–I couldn’t see that it was you, it was… well, it made me panic. I think if I was on my back, and I could see your face, that I would feel much better.”

So fucking simple. So fucking easy. So fucking not a big deal– to Gale, at any rate. Clearly. He’s talking about it like tomorrow’s weather forecast. He already has it all worked out. 

Still could have caught it sooner, before he had to fucking safeword.

“Clove?”

Her foot was bouncing again.

“Oh,” Clove says, and she must have used all her remaining willpower on stilling her foot, because in the very same breath, she erupts into loud, heaving, uncontrollable sobs. 

Gale is panicking again, now. She can’t see him, but she can hear him panicking, because she is meant to be calm right now, and she is not. 

“Clove, oh love, oh my God. Come here. It’s alright. I’m alright. Everything’s fine. I didn’t know you were so upset or I would have–God, Clove. Everything is okay, sweetheart. I promise.”

Clove shakes her head violently and tries to squirm away, but Gale’s hands don’t move from where he’s gripping the side of her head, and he follows her. “Don’t,” she hiccups. “I don’t–you shouldn’t have to.”

“I can calm you down, my beloved. I am neither injured nor distressed. Clove, it’s alright. Let me hold you, silly girl.”

He tips their foreheads together as he talks, and even though Clove barely wants it to, it helps. 

“Can you tell me why you’re so upset, please?” he asks quietly, once she’s begun to droop into him like a wilting flower.

“I’ve just been–I’ve been so fucking stressed about this,” she chokes out, and it feels like a chainsaw as it comes up her throat, but God, did she ever need to fucking say it, and now that it’s out, the rest comes out like thread unspooling. “I’ve been so‐so fucking scared, since the very first time you brought it up, and I feel like I’ve fucked it up every step of the way, because I just got a little nervous and then suddenly I was… flying blind. Like I lost my mojo, or–or my radar, or my instincts. And we finally got here, and I knew something wasn’t right, but I didn’t trust myself, because when the fuck have I been trustworthy lately? And then it was wrong, and I fucked it all up, and it’s all just… it’s a lot. It’s too fucking much.”

Gale’s forehead disappears. “Clove, look at me.”

She shakes her head.

“Please.”

It’s too blurry and too bright and too much out here, but her view comes into focus slowly, and then, there’s Gale. The whole view. Grave and concerned and looking at her like she’s someone entirely different from the person she feels herself to be at the moment. Holding his stormy gaze feels like being raked over hot coals, but she perseveres.

“You didn’t fuck anything up. Frankly, I don’t know how on earth you came to that conclusion. You could have had no better idea of how that would feel than I did, and I had no idea until the last second. I thought you did beautifully. I have thought that of you on every step of this journey. I thought we were both under that impression, until very recently.”

“I could tell, though,” she whispers. “That something was wrong. Before.”

“And you asked, and took me at my word. What else do you expect of yourself? Mind reading? You’re torturing yourself over nothing.” 

At this very decisive accusation, Clove finally starts to feel a bit sheepish, and Gale’s expression softens. He rubs his thumb in soothing circles on her temple. 

“Secondly, you are trustworthy. I trust you more than anyone in the world. And lastly…”

Gale is suddenly fighting tears to make it to the third thing on his list, and Clove reaches for his hand on the side of her head so she can hold onto him.

“... have you really been scared since the start?” 

“Terrified.” 

“Why didn’t you tell me?”

Clove shrugs helplessly. “I still wanted it really badly, and I wanted it to be exactly what you wanted, and I didn’t want you to have to worry about it too, you know? Or worry about me, anyway. I thought I could just, you know. Be alright. Shrug it off.” 

“I don’t think this is the type of worry you’re meant to shrug off, dearest.”

Gale is crying a little bit, but he’s also teasing her a little bit, and it makes the world feel a bit more like the world Clove knows again. 

“I did really want this,” Clove says, voice breaking from honesty alone. “I was mostly stressed because I really wanted it to be perfect for you.”

“Do you still want it? Do you want to try again?” 

Clove hesitates for a moment, then nods. “Yes. Just… not right now.”

He nods. “Yes. Me too. Alright. Clove?”

“Yeah.”

“Please tell me, next time. If you’re scared. No matter what it is. Please. Not knowing why you were so upset was far scarier than what I used a safeword over, and… I have a responsibility to you too, love.” 

He says it gently, but Clove feels exactly as scolded as she should, shame burning a hot little hole in the base of her skull.

“I will. I’m really sorry,” she whispers. 

“You’re forgiven. I love you.”

“I love you too.”

“Do you think finally being able to talk about this may aid you in finding your missing remote?”

Clove smiles, tired and teary and hard won. “I hope so.” 

(6) “Are you ready?” Clove asks, tender as she can, one hand resting easy on his thigh where it’s slung over hers.

Gale smiles up at her, the ideal amount of pink from chest to hairline and whole body wiggling a little bit with anticipation. “Yes.” 

His eyes flutter shut briefly as she pushes inside, then blink back open rapidly, searching for her face, fighting tooth and nail for the brain power to stay focused on it. Clove leans forward ever so carefully, still not moving inside him, and cups his cheek. 

“You’re fucking gorgeous,” she whispers as she starts to push again, and Gale’s head lists to the left so he can stifle his groan in her palm. He keeps his lips buried there, his measured breaths warming her skin, but his eyes never leave her face, not once, not even when they grow a little unfocused. “I love you,” she murmurs, just before her hips finally connect with his ass, and they both moan. “How’s that?” 

Gale nods feverishly, reaches for her breasts, then abandons that idea in favor of clinging to her arms. 

Clove uncovers his mouth, ignoring his whine, and digs her nails into his jaw instead. “Tell me,” she says roughly.

“It feels–you feel so… inescapable, and good, and so much, and it’s–god, you look fucking incredible, too. Clove, Clove, please move,” he ends on a hoarse plea, and Clove basks in the warmth of his compliments as she withdraws slowly, as far as she can go without slipping out.

She does look good–in the harness she wanted. Dark purple and leathery and yeah, okay, Gale’s right. She looks fucking incredible in it, and not only that, but it makes her feel fucking powerful. No brief or slippery thing, but a deep-rooted, instinctual power that she clings fiercely to, happy to let it guide her hips, let it give her a little more confidence and ease her worries, as she sinks slowly back into him. Gale’s nails scrape down her forearms at exactly the same pace.

“Fucking hell, Clove,” he pants, sweat already beading on his temples.

Clove threads a hand into his hair, and grips tight enough to sting, and he moans just as loud as she hoped about it. “Good boy. Such a good slut for me.”

This time, when she withdraws with exaggerated slowness, Gale whines, and she tugs harder, then thrusts her cock into him with just a little more force. 

Her cock. The change in phrasing was by Gale’s request, and the change in harness was hers, though both were accompanied by appropriately mortifying confessions. The wording took some getting used to, admittedly. Some stupid embarrassing fucking practice in front of a mirror to let it sink in, but now the possessive makes her a little lightheaded. Her sinking into him, her fucking him, her driving this car, now that she can sit comfortably in the driver’s seat again. Her eyes flood with tears at the thought. Gale frowns, reaches for her face, and she leans down to meet him, nuzzling his palm.

“It’s okay; it’s good,” she whispers. “I’m happy.”

Gale must truly believe her, because he quirks a playful brow. “Then fuck me already.”

Clove growls through the tears, sits back up, grips both his hips with bruising force, and begins to move. It takes some figuring out. Thrusting with her hips like this is still not something she’s done a lot of, not without Gale mostly doing it for her, but if there is one thing in this world Clove knows well, it’s Gale’s face. 

She can read his reaction to every thrust the moment she bottoms out. She knows which ones feel the best, and the worst, and can place the rest in ranking order between the two. She knows him, has spent years in the learning, knows him all the way in her bones, and she is a quick fucking study when she wants to be. Only a few minutes, and she’s holding him at his favorite angle, using his favorite amount of force, making all his favorite noises, saying all his favorite words, and Gale is crying along with her. Clove doesn’t need to ask if they’re good tears. She knows. 

“I know, baby. I’ve got you. This is what you wanted, isn’t it? Do you feel full now?”

A frantic nod. “Yes, Clove, fuck, I’m–”

“Do you feel satisfied?” 

An equally frantic shake. “No, god no, more, harder. You feel so fucking good, please.”

“More what?”

“More of–of you, please, Clove–”

“More of what?”

“Your cock,” he gasps, flushing impossibly red, then crying out as Clove slams into him to emphasize how much she liked hearing it, hoping it will encourage him, and it does. “I want more of you. You feel so good. Fuck me harder. Please, Clove. I love this so much.”

Clove leans down so quickly Gale jumps a little bit as her lips meet with his, but he still kisses her back with no hesitation, happy to feed her all his muted noises, happy to have her close and inside him at once.

“I love it too,” she murmurs against his lips, voice breaking once more from honesty alone. Then she straightens, readjusts her grip, and fucks Gale the way she’s secretly wanted to since she laid eyes on him, and the way he loses his mind about it is better than any fantasy she’s had since.

Clutching wildly at any part of her he can reach, sobbing and only occasionally trying to stifle it in the sheets, glistening with sweat and visibly exhausted and so wildly on the edge.

“Touch yourself, Gale,” Clove says, more plea than command, and only because she needs both hands to keep this pace up.

Gale’s hands both jump, then stall for a second, as if his brain struggles in its frantic rush to determine which one to send the order to, and then he wraps his right hand around his cock, lays his other hand over hers on his hip, and falls apart for her in an utterly fucking gorgeous way she has never witnessed before and hopes to see repeated a thousand times over before she dies.

Clove leans down once more, cock still buried but still inside him, and peppers kisses across his face. “That was fucking incredible,” she whispers. “Thank you.”

Gale’s eyes flutter open, glassy and dazed. “God, I should… I should really be the one thanking you right now.” 

“Don’t you dare,” she threatens, pulling out as gently as she can and removing the harness. She collapses next to him, and scoops him into her chest like a pile of cooked spaghetti. 

“Why not?” he squeaks after a long silence. 

“I already know.” 

“Mojo working well again, I take it?”

“Yeah. I think you fixed it.” 

“You fixed it.” 

“I broke it.”

“Clove,” he sighs, twisting his neck to peer up at her with a frown. “It’s a wonder to me how you are so incredibly hard on yourself while being so naturally, breathtakingly good at everything you do.”

Clove sniffles, and shrugs. “I’m naturally, breathtakingly good at being hard on myself.”

A heavier sigh, and then a hand slips between her legs. “Do you think I could express my gratitude well enough that you forget how?”

“Oh, you could try.” 

Chapter Text

Gale was only that close to the door because she kept getting louder, always louder and louder with every fight, every sentence, until every word made his insides turn to glass and every voice in his head screamed ‘run!’ and even then, he still didn’t run. Just inched towards the door like a cowardly worm; resigned himself to being stuck in her ear-piercing web until they checked out the next morning. The paint on the door handle mocked him for it. Mystra did, too.

The paint mocks him still, up this fucking late, years later, thinking of what he could have said to end the argument before she got so goddamn loud, before his insides shattered, before he was willing to resort to anything at all to make it stop.

Plop.

He dumps the flour into the mixing bowl with a bit too much vigor, and it explodes upwards in a giant white plume, then settles on everything in a neat single foot wide radius, including Gale himself.

“Fuck!” he swears, much louder than he should be this late, and much louder than the incident necessitates. He is wearing an apron for a reason, after all. 

The mess on the counter can be cleaned, he tells himself impatiently, as his hands shake almost too violently for him to successfully level off the next cup of flour. There is no reason to be having this bad of a night. You are being absurd. 

Mystra’s voice cracks like a whip in his mind, resurfacing mid-self-scolding, which seems rather appropriate, and Gale flinches so hard with the volume of the memory he knocks the entire bag of flour over.

“Fuck!” he swears again, still too loud, righting the bag with violence and stomping his foot like a toddler and so incredibly done with this entire miserable night.

He stares at the measuring cup for a solid ten seconds, ears ringing, willing it to move for him, measure the flour for him, clean up the absolute mess on the counter for him, because his hands are shaking too much to do anything useful anymore.

“Hey.”

“Fuck!” 

Full on heart attack. Chest screaming. 

It’s just Clove. Who else would it be? He woke her up with all his ruckus, though she’s really only half awake, at best. Hair pointed every which way, in a wrinkly hoodie and her underwear, eyes crusted with sleep and squinting against the light of the kitchen and–oh, Gale has knocked the flour over again.

“Fuck! Sorry. You startled me.” Gale rights the flour once more, slides it a safe distance across the counter from himself, and resists the urge to bash his head against the wall at the added presence of a witness to this entire situation.

“Yeah, I could tell,” she croaks. She gives him a sleepy, lopsided, ridiculous grin, and Gale wants to disappear.  “What are you doing? It’s, like, nearly three.”

Isn’t it rather obvious?

“Baking. I hope I did not wake you.”

“Baking what?” 

“Cake.”

“What kind?”

Always so many questions, and always the ones that dig him a deeper grave to be buried in. 

“Well… two kinds.”

“You’re baking two cakes? At three in the morning?”

Gale bristles. Deep inside, an alarm is blaring. Clove should go back to bed. He will only be unpleasant to her, and he does not want to be unpleasant to her. “Yes.” 

“What kinds?” Utterly unconcerned. Barrelling onward with all her usual steam engine force.

He lets out a long breath through his nose. “Chocolate rum cake, and a chamomile tea cake.”

“Why both?”

“You like the former, and my colleague likes the latter, so it seemed…” Gale is grasping at straws, “... correct.”

“What about you?”

“What?”

“What kind of cake do you like?”

“Well, I… I like German chocolate cake.”

“Shouldn’t you make one of those too, then?”

“You’re suggesting I make a third cake?”

“Well, it just seems like you left someone important out of the equation, is all.”

Gale just stares at her. Clove’s eyes flicker to the pile of flour on the counter. Her mouth twitches.

Do not–

“Did you decide the flour didn’t need a bag anymore?” 

Gale intends to snap at her, exasperated and out of patience. As the invoked emotion bubbles in his chest, though, it feels closer to hysterical laughter. When it exits his mouth, it’s a tiny, tearless sob. 

The most humiliating possibility. 

Clove comes to him immediately, because of course she does, and she hugs him even though he pretends he doesn’t want her to. “Sorry,” she whispers, as if any of this is her fault. “I thought it would make you laugh.”

“I know,” Gale says in a thin voice. “Another night, it would have.” 

“What’s wrong with tonight?”

“I don’t know.” 

“Is work stressing you out?”

That’s what lying gets him: more questions. Gale sighs. 

“No. I’ve been thinking about… Mystra. Lingering pointlessly in unpleasant memories. Or trapped in them, perhaps more accurately.”

“Like, fights?”

“Yes.”

“Still thinking of your perfect comeback?”

Half asleep, and she still reads him like a book. Gale grimaces.

“Yes.”

Clove hums, and peels him off her shoulder, holding him at arm’s length. She’s smiling a little bit, in spite of… everything. “Look at you,” she coos. “Having a bad night and you’re in here, in a goddamn apron, baking not one, but two cakes, and neither of them are for you. Have you considered that Mystra didn’t deserve you for a fucking second? That’s the only comeback you need, right there. I think about it all the time. You are the catch of all time.” 

Gale looks around the kitchen, gesturing helplessly. “Clove, I’m a mess.” 

“I don’t think you know what a mess is.”

“I know one when I see one,” Gale snaps.

Clove bites her lip, stares hard at him for a long moment, then turns, scatters the pile of flour across the counter, and hops up to take a bare-thighed, ass-half-out seat directly on top of it. She crosses her flour-caked legs primly, folds her hands in her now white-dusted lap, and smiles wickedly at him. “Do you not like messes, Gale?” 

Gale is momentarily so flabbergasted he forgets he is in a bad mood. “What?”

She switches the positioning of her legs. A little flour drifts to the floor. Gale’s eyes follow it like a hawk, and Clove watches him, grin widening. “I asked if you don’t like messes.”

“I do not.” 

“Okay. Well. Are you mad about it?”

“Clove.”

“Fight me, Gale.”

“Fight you?”

“Yeah. Can’t argue with Mystra if you’re arguing with me. And I’m pretty good at arguing. I’ll hold my own. You won’t hurt my feelings, I promise.”

“I do not want to fight you. I am not going to do that.”

“Oh, come on. I’m your worst nightmare. I’m disrupting your baking, making the mess worse, getting in your way, harassing you with questions. I’m awful. Take it out on me, Gale. Get a little mean.”

“Why on earth would I do that?”

Clove shrugs. “You might enjoy it.” She pauses, smiles again, eyes twinkling with mischief. “I might, too.”

Gale sees the path she is steering them towards, the subtle suggestion, and all but forces himself to ignore it. He shakes his head stubbornly.

“I’m not going to do that.” 

Clove gnaws on the inside of her cheek. “Okay, fine,” she relents. “Get stoned with me, at least. Getting baked while you bake is basically a rite of passage, and it might calm your head.”

“Clove,” Gale says more softly, thawing a little. “You don’t need to stay up with me. I’ll be alright.” 

“I want to stay up with you. I can’t possibly be making this a worse time than it was already. You looked two seconds from setting the kitchen on fire on purpose when I came down here, and now you just look… a little grumpy. Maybe a bit disheveled. I’d call that an improvement.”

Gale opens his mouth, then shuts it again. 

“The gummies are in the cabinet to the left of the fridge,” she adds helpfully. “I’d grab them myself, but I’d get flour everywhere.” 

Another slow exhale. He finds his words again. Barely. “You’re provoking me.”

“I’m just trying not to make a mess. I thought you’d appreciate that.”

Gale runs his tongue over his teeth. 

He could be mean.

Clove is right: he might enjoy it. And looking at her now–her playful expression, her filthy thighs, the flour on the crotch of her underwear, her eyes brimming with mirth and kindness–he knows that for all she’s taunting him, she is genuinely trying to make his night better, and, well, he is not so blind as to not be intrigued by her proposition.

“Fine,” he snipes, but there’s no more venom to it, and Clove can tell. She reaches out with the toe of a socked foot to brush his knee as he delivers two gummies to her outstretched hand.

“So I can help you bake?”

Gale shoots her a look as he chews. “You can watch.”

“Why can’t I help?” Clove hooks her foot around the back of his knee and drags him closer, lower lip already jutted out in a pout.

“You would be unhelpful,” Gale says, as dignified as he can while stumbling a little. He disentangles himself from her legs with a small huff.

The pout grows, and she promptly ensnares him again. “Why do you say that?” 

“Well, you are already taking up a sizable amount of valuable counter space–”

“Oh yeah, your flour-snowman-building counter, so sorry.”

“–and you have already made quite a mess–

“And you hate messes.”

“–and you are already being a hindrance by asking me questions and not allowing me to answer them.”

He keeps expecting hurt to flash across her face, or some other slip–a little defensive snap, maybe. Just a hint of genuine upset, but there is none. She is simply unphased. Having a fun little time playing this game she decided on the turn of a very late-night dime they were going to play together, and because Clove is Clove, and Gale is Gale, she is getting away with it.

She releases him with deliberate slowness, and shrugs. “Fine. Bake, then. I’ll just sit here.” 

Gale grinds his teeth for a moment, then steps up to the counter beside her, and checks the recipe on his phone. Clove drums her fingers on the countertop. 

“I need a quarter measuring cup,” he announces stiffly.

Clove stares at him blankly. 

“They’re in the drawer right underneath you.” 

“Oh. My bad.”

Of course she doesn’t know where the measuring cups are kept. Of course she doesn’t just grab it for him. Of course she spreads her legs as wide as they will go, and waits. Of course Gale is getting hard, and her eyes immediately flicker to it, even through the goddamn apron, and of course she goes just that tiny bit more smug, just enough to push her over the narrow boundary into being entirely insufferable, and spreads her legs an impossible inch wider.

Gale is a match for Clove in precious little in this life. It seems unlikely he’s her match in this. For all he knows, she could keep this up all night, and he would still be floundering come sunrise. 

“You told me I couldn’t help,” Clove prompts, interrupting his gawking.

Overtaken by an impulse of either lust or insanity, if there’s even a difference between the two anymore, Gale steps between her legs, grabs her ass with both hands to yank her hips forward on the counter, making even more of an absolute floury mess of his apron as he grinds her against himself, and seals his lips over hers in what he hopes is a punishing kiss.

This gets a genuine reaction out of her. Taken off guard and distracted from her own game, Clove is suddenly riding on pure instinct, which apparently dictates that she throw her arms around him, wind a hand into his hair and viciously try to pull him even closer with an unabashed moan.

Gale would smile, if his lips weren’t so busy. Slowly, while she’s distracted by his tongue and his cock and a few low moans of his own, he collects her hands from where they’ve landed, and guides them behind her back. Clove is either oblivious, or unconcerned.

Just as her hips begin to move in a lovely, steady rhythm, he breaks the kiss, and ducks her attempt to chase him by leaning past her cheek, right in close to her ear. He tightens his grip on her wrists behind her back conspicuously, and Clove tenses, suddenly at attention. 

“I cannot bake while high, my love.” 

“Sure you can,” she pants, nudging her head to the side, still trying for another kiss. 

“No,” he says sharply, accentuating it with a harsh nip at the lobe of her ear, “I cannot. These need to be in the oven by the time the edibles take effect, and you need to let me make that happen.”

“I wasn’t aware I was stopping you.”

“And if you won’t quit being a hindrance voluntarily, I’ll find ways to force the issue.”

Clove hesitates, wiggling her wrists. “Okay. I’ll be good.” She wiggles her hips. “Promise.”

Gale is nearly entirely certain he is winning this particular battle because Clove wants to wait until she’s high to get fucked, but he’ll take any win he can get. If this is indeed a win at all, and not just a bluff. He releases her hands, and steps back from her. 

Clove allows it. She sits patiently, still and quiet, as he retrieves his measuring cup from between her legs, and closes them as soon as he’s done. Gale smiles, and leans in to kiss her sweetly.

“Good girl,” he murmurs against her lips, and Clove shivers. The head rush nearly makes his knees buckle. 

Then, to his actual surprise, she keeps to her word. Gale bakes, and Clove behaves. She chats at him about her night at work, which he was in too sour a mood to ask her about when she got home. Gale fields her bountiful questions about his baking with what bears a much closer resemblance to his usual endless tolerance for anything Clove wants to ask him. She even grabs him measuring spoons when he needs them. 

Still absolutely covered in flour, legs swinging happily, half dressed and halfway to stoned and fully the love of his life; Clove has already made his night better, and they’re not even high yet. The fight is a memory again, and not one worth lingering in. Mystra is no longer a presence in the room, because there is simply no space for her anymore–not with Clove here.

“This reminds me of the night we met,” Gale says suddenly as he sifts cocoa, his private reveries made public for the simple and righteous cause of trying to make Clove smile. 

Clove tilts her head at him. “Does it?” 

“Yes. I was thinking about Mystra, and then you happened.” 

It’s already worth it; she smiles. 

“She doesn’t like being in the same room as me, huh?” 

“No.”

“Do you think about her a lot?”

Gale shrugs, a little uncomfortable. “Not terribly often.”

“I wasn’t judging. I think about my dad all the fucking time.” 

“She has certainly left me many ghosts to find, tucked away places I didn’t even know existed.”

“Where’d you find one this time?”

Gale wrinkles his nose. “I had a meeting today, and it was in this room that was painted yellow, and the specific shade of yellow, for whatever reason, was immediately and strongly reminiscent of a yellow paint I observed at another point in my life. It was bizarre. I hadn’t thought of that paint in years. I didn’t even know I remembered it.”

The room goes quiet after this. The squeaking of the sifter becomes impossibly loud, and Gale is glad when he’s done with it. 

“Did you have a fight around the yellow paint?” Clove asks finally. Intuitive as ever.

Gale swallows. “Well, yes, and the fight was… notable, I suppose. I just didn’t know the paint was notable in and of itself–well, actually, I suppose maybe I did? Or at least, I know why I remember. It wasn’t the whole room, it was just a stray swipe on the door handle, and I couldn’t understand how yellow paint got on the door handle, when nothing else in the room was yellow. I was fixated on it. What kind of accident made that happen?”

“Maybe the room was yellow at some point.”

Gale looks up at her, and lets out a slow breath. “Perhaps. I hadn’t thought of that.”

“How are those cakes coming along?” she teases, because he hasn’t so much as stirred since he finished sifting cocoa. 

Gale snaps the hand towel he keeps draped over his shoulder at her. “I’m making good time, I assure you.”

He resumes his baking, though, and Clove falls silent for a bit. Finally, she nudges his leg with her foot. “I’m glad I can make her fuck off out of your head for a bit. She didn’t deserve you. I really meant that.”

“I know, my love.”

Clove reaches for him, then; drags him in for a kiss and a few tender whispered words, and maybe it delays his baking a little longer, but that’s alright. When Clove lets him go again, the air in the room is a little easier to breathe, and Gale refocuses on his task, and Clove refocuses on… something. 

“You look good in an apron,” she says, apropos of nothing, as Gale mixes the final batter concoction together for the chamomile cake. 

Gale smiles, and says nothing. 

“And with a cute little towel over your shoulder.”

“Mm.”

Clove reaches for him again, and he raises an eyebrow at her. 

“What?” she asks innocently.

“I thought you were going to let me bake.”

“I did. Aren’t you almost done?” 

“They are not in the oven yet, and time is beginning to run short.” 

Clove grins. “I know.”

She gives up with a huff at his responding glare, but Gale feels the clock speeding up with her impatience anyway.

He makes it all the way to lining and greasing the pans before Clove gives it up–just as the first signs of a high start tingling away at the base of his skull, of course. He is sizing and cutting out pieces of parchment paper when Clove reaches over, grabs the pan he is preparing to work on, and sets it down directly between her thighs. Gale raises an eyebrow at her.

“I’m using that.”

“I know. You can use it here, can’t you?” 

“Clove,” he warns.

“I’ve been good, haven’t I?”

Gale narrows his eyes at her.

“Please? I like you. Be closer to me.”

She says this very softly, and very fondly, and manipulation or not, Gale is pulled in by it with barely a second thought. He stations himself between her legs to continue his work with a resigned sigh, and Clove practically purrs about it, and immediately abandons all efforts to behave, which he should have expected, really.

Both hands, wandering endlessly, anywhere they can reach. Running through his hair, caressing his cheek, brushing a thumb across his lips, two fingers lightly encircling his wrist as he works. Gale ignores her as best he can, and continues doggedly. He is so close to finished, to the damned things being in the oven and out of the way for a while, to being stoned and unrestricted and inside her.

God, her crotch is right there, though, hovering just at the edge of his vision, forever drawing his attention, and he can imagine how she’d smell, how she’d taste, how warm she’d feel, and she wants him even in his fucking apron, and–

He makes it all the way to pouring the batter for the chocolate rum cake, near delirious and cock screaming at him from under all its layers and edible crashing into him like a train, staring so hard at the batter to avoid looking at her that he sees with perfect, absurd clarity when a finger dips into the stream of his batter, curls, and leaves. He follows it, against his own will, all the way to Clove’s mouth, where she licks it clean. 

‘Clean.’

Clove’s hands are anything but clean. Gale grinds his teeth together. Clove watches it, cocks her head, then dips her saliva-slick finger straight back into the batter, and offers it to him. 

“Clove.”

“What? It’s mine, isn’t it? It’s good. Try it.”

“I know it’s good. I made it.”

Clove rolls her eyes, jabbing her finger closer to his face. “Try it.”

Gale sucks it off her finger in one, quick, dissatisfying swipe, and sets the bowl down. “Stay,” he snaps. “And don’t stick your grubby fingers back in my batter.”

Her eyebrows lift skeptically, but then she shrugs, and Gale stalks off upstairs. He’s practically shaking as he grabs their padded handcuffs from the bedroom. High on weed and adrenaline, excited, pent up, a little anxious. When he comes back downstairs, Clove has half followed his instructions, which is more than he expected. She’s in the same spot, and licking batter off her finger. Gale doesn’t say a word. He reaches across the island she’s seated on from behind her, collects her arms, and tugs them behind her back. Clove stiffens as he cuffs her, but doesn’t fight it, not until the very end, when it’s fully secure. Then, she squirms, testing her restraints.

“What was that for?” she asks haughtily. 

Gale doesn’t honor this with a response. He comes back around the counter, stations himself once more between her legs, and resumes pouring his batter. In the silence that follows, he listens to Clove’s breathing speed up a little. Twice, her hips shift. Exactly once, she makes a sound like she swallowed a whine and it took a while to make its way back down her throat.

Gale knows how she’s feeling. He’s been ignored by Clove before while restrained. He is familiar with the kind of fire it stokes, and her edible is probably kicking in right about now, too. It must be a lot, inside Clove’s head right now. A bit of whiplash. A bit of her own pent up desire roaring like a jet engine. A bit of helplessness.

Regardless, it allows him to finish his work. He gets both pans prepped, both batters poured and smoothed out to his perfectionist heart’s exact desires. Then, finally, he allows himself to look up at Clove’s face, and of course, she takes his breath away. His knees nearly go out again.

Lips parted, pupils blown wide, panting a little now, forehead damp with sweat. His lover, who could do whatever she wants to him forever, and lets him get away with shit like this anyway. 

Gale scoops up some of her cake’s batter on one finger. “Would you like more?” he offers, sweet as the mixture itself.

Clove nods, so Gale sucks the batter into his own mouth, then offers it to her from his tongue, and Clove makes a sound like he fucking broke her, legs locking around him like a vice as she sucks every bit of sugar from his mouth. 

“Fuck, Gale, what the hell–”

“Shh, my love,” Gale coos. “They need to go in the oven, remember?” 

Clove hesitates, breathing hard, then unwraps her legs reluctantly, and shifts on the counter as he steps away from her. “Come back,” she orders hoarsely, and Gale smiles. 

“Of course.”

He has to rearrange the racks in the oven, which makes Clove huff not once, not twice, but three times. Finally, though, he manages it.

The cakes are in the oven. A timer is set for thirty five minutes. Gale turns back to Clove.

They are both fully high now. It’s obvious from the way Clove looks, the way Gale feels, the way they’re both breathing. Gale is dizzy with options, power, a tied up Clove, floury and wet for him on the counter. Too many options. He needs the time to run through them all properly. 

So before he returns to her, he opens the cabinet, and retrieves the gummies once again. He comes to a stop between Clove’s legs, trying not to listen to her light panting because it’s making his cock throb, and shakes two gummies out onto his palm. He eats one himself, then pinches the other between two fingers.

“Open,” he says quietly. 

Clove’s eyes grow wide, but she opens her mouth without objection, and Gale places the gummy in the exact center of her tongue, slow and deliberate, then caresses her jaw on the way back out. 

“Eat.”

Clove obeys.

“Good girl,” he praises, kissing her softly. “I need you to stay high for me, my love, because I need you to wait a little longer. And you want to be high, don’t you? When I fuck you?” 

“Why do I have to wait?” 

“Because I need to do the dishes.” 

She scoffs. “No you don’t. Fuck me, Gale. Right in front of all the dirty dishes. I don’t mind the audience.”

It’s at least partially a command, but mostly it’s a plea, and Gale would be lying if it didn’t make him feel a little drunk on top of the high. He smiles softly to himself as he drags one slow finger up the crotch of her underwear, with just enough pressure that the fabric soaks through in an instant. Clove’s breathing speeds up again.

“Such a mess,” Gale chides, pulling his finger away and examining the flour on it. 

“Then take them off of me,” she snaps. “No way you’re doing the fucking dishes.”

She says it almost like she’s the one in control here, but she’s really just the one with her hands stuck behind her back. 

Except, well, he really was planning to take her underwear off anyway, and now she went and made it into him following an order. Gale does love malicious compliance when performing in his usual role, though–who’s to say he can’t enjoy it here, too? The idea that pops into his head is a bold one, sure, but Clove is high, and half gone for him already, and he thinks perhaps he can get away with it.

She doesn’t… particularly like this pair, anyway. They’re nothing special. Plain black cotton, snug and comfy and Gale is pretty sure she has four or five others just like them. He’ll buy her as many as she wants in replacement. This pair, flour-caked and now soaked with her arousal, is his. 

He doesn’t bother with trying to distract her, or making sure she doesn’t see. There’s no point. He reaches maybe eighteen inches to his right, where the knife block is, and where the kitchen scissors are in their proper slot, as always. Gale keeps his kitchen organized for good reason–so he can reach for what he needs without ever taking his eyes off his prize. It only takes two clean cuts, one up each side of her hips, far from her hair and holding the fabric away from her skin so he doesn’t nick her. The fact that Clove says nothing, not even through the second one, tells him quite a bit about how little she expected this. Exactly how maliciously compliant he succeeded at being.

The remaining flap of her underwear falls uselessly to the counter, exposing her to him, just as wet as he envisioned and much more swollen than he expected and so very tempting, and it takes at least ten seconds for Clove to process her shock well enough to have any reaction at all.

Then, she laughs, and Gale is immediately unclear as to how he ever expected anything else. Of course Clove laughs, full throated and foundation-shakingly loud, until she’s reduced to wheezing by the force of it, head dropping onto the towel on Gale’s shoulder while her whole body shakes. Gale can do nothing but laugh with her.

It was rather comical, in hindsight, and they're high. Did he really just feed them another gummy each?

“You are so persnickety about what we use those damn kitchen scissors for,” Clove gasps into his neck. 

“I’ll never live this down, I’m aware,” Gale mutters, with palpable affection.

Clove lifts her head slowly from shoulder, still giggling quietly, lips trailing up his neck and over his jaw, on the hunt for his lips. Gale doesn’t aid her hunt, necessarily, but he stays still, allows her to seek him out, and groans softly as she licks into his mouth. She is kissing him to seduce him, to make him forget the dishes, to draw him in–and to her credit, she is very good at it. Even with no hands to aid her, she controls the kiss with ease, curling her body around his like a python to keep him right where she wants him, nudging his head insistently when she needs him to adjust for her.

Gale melts a little bit under the force of her single minded focus, despite his best intentions. He reaches an instinctual two fingers down to drag up her folds, moaning at the obscene wet so close to the cold granite, the heat of her only maybe eight inches from his cock, and the stuttered rolling of Clove’s hips into the pressure.

“Fuck, Gale,” she chokes out, losing her precarious balance as their lips part and collapsing awkwardly on his shoulder. Gale catches her with both hands, and heaves her upright. 

“You feel… God, I want to taste you,” he groans, dragging her back for another searing, breathless kiss. Clove sags against him–letting him take over, enjoying the fruits of her labor, because she thinks she’s won. 

No. No no no.

Gale breaks from the kiss and takes a small step back, holding onto her shoulders to keep her secure as she inevitably chases him, apparently fully willing to launch herself off the counter in the process. Once she’s steady, he reaches down to tease her entrance with two fingers, only barely pressing inside, just enough to keep her relatively quiet and squirming with anticipation.

“I need to do the dishes, my love,” he says softly. Clove opens her mouth, but he shushes her before anything can come out . “Shhh, shh, here, I’ll tell you what. You can sit right next to me, right here in all the mess you made, and you can wait patiently for me to be done.”

“Absolutely fucking not.”

“Ah, but there are rules, lover,” Gale coos, and when Clove opens her mouth again, he quickly slips two fingers past her lips. Her eyes blow wide, and she huffs at first, then seems unable to resist the temptation to seal her lips around them and suck anyway. “That’s the first rule. You will be quiet.”

Clove growls her protest, unquiet as she can, and Gale ignores her.

“The second rule,” he says, leaving her dripping cunt for a brief moment to nudge her legs further apart, “is that you will keep your legs open so I can enjoy my favorite view while I work.”

For all her supposed defiance, Gale doesn’t miss that she takes his fingers a little deeper at the compliment. 

“Third rule,” he breathes, sinking the same fingers on his other hand deep inside her in one smooth motion, crooking them slightly, thumb already settling in to circle her clit, and Clove nearly chokes herself on his fingers as her cunt clenches hard enough to send a whole body spasm rocketing up her spine. “You are going to make a mess for me, Clove. Here on this counter. By the time I finish the dishes, the biggest mess in the room is going to be right here between your legs.” 

At this, Clove’s eyes roll back, and her back arches, and she comes around all four of his fingers with a strangled little whine. Gale nearly falls to his knees with the shock of it–watching her, listening to her, feeling her, knowing he did that and he’s been inside her for less than twenty seconds. High, bound, underwear reduced to a useless strip of fabric on the counter, the love of his life, his.

He did not altogether intend for her to come yet, but absolutely nothing could make him regret it now. Clove’s eyes flutter open as he withdraws his fingers slowly, and the awe must be written all over his face, because she smiles at him, dazed but warm, and doesn’t say a word. 

He has earned her cooperation, it seems; she is satisfied enough to follow his rules. For now.

“Good fucking girl,” he mutters, gives her one last lingering kiss through her winded moan, then leaves her to start on the dishes.

He leaves the timer up on his phone screen, and places it deliberately between the sink and Clove, so they both know exactly how long they are capable of enduring this for. Clove only sighs quietly about it.

It takes eight minutes for her to start squirming, which Gale is, frankly, rather impressed by. A little wiggle of her hips, the occasional twitching of her legs needing the relief of closing but persevering anyway, arching her back like that might bring her cunt relief all on its own. At eleven minutes, the squirming gains an accompaniment of occasional whimpers, and Gale’s own focus begins to unravel quicker than he anticipated.

For all his talk of enjoying the view, he’s been trying desperately not to look. Not directly. It will only end poorly for him, he knows. At twelve minutes, though, his willpower snaps on the very neediest of her little noises, and he looks, and the sight nearly knocks his legs out from under him for the fourth time that night. 

Every rule, followed to the letter. She made an absolute filthy mess on the counter, mixed in now with all the flour, even though all he’s done is struggle to do the dishes next to her. Then, somehow even more appealing than that, her thighs are trembling with the effort of holding her legs open for so long, and when Gale’s eyes land on her core, she moans like she can feel his gaze physically–so clearly trying her very best to do it quietly, and still failing. 

Gale meant to steal a quick glance, but now he’s staring and he can’t stop for anything, so he forces his eyes upwards instead of away, raking over every dangerous inch of her on the way up to her face. Clove meets his gaze for only a brief moment before she lets her eyes slip closed, tosses her head back, and whimpers softly with the effort of forcing her shaking thighs just a meager inch farther apart for him.

Gale is still not winning, and he knows it. This is malicious compliance, too. This is following the rules just well enough to avoid punishment, and not a smidge more; playing it straight, but still cut throat enough to win the whole fucking pot, because Clove is irresistible, and nobody knows it better than her. The dish in his hands clatters into the sink, and he barely manages to dip his hands back under the water to get the soap off before he uses them, still dripping wet, to grasp the insides of her already soaked thighs, and sinks to his knees right on the kitchen tile. His knees could be on Mars, for all he knows, and the water running in the background does nothing to drown out Clove’s frantic sobs above him, her hoarse cries of mostly just his name, her heels pounding on the cabinet doors. The running water is just a reminder that he’s meant to be doing something else, and thank god he has his face buried in Clove’s cunt instead. So fucking wet and swollen and warm, the perfect reward for all his patience; she would probably come in two seconds again if he let her, but he has other plans.

There is no catching him off guard this time. Clove gets close almost immediately, as he anticipated, and he retreats. He pushes his nose up through her hair instead, nudging greedily underneath her sweatshirt and trailing up to her navel, breathing her in. 

“So obedient, all of a sudden,” he murmurs. “What changed, lover? Did your first release make you hungry for your second?”

“You seem awfully hungry yourself,” she says, too breathless to be a snap, too choked with lust to be an effective taunt, though she manages to lean over and turn the water off with her hands still cuffed behind her back, which is rather impressive, really.

Gale nips at the inside of her hip. “Naughty,” he scolds lightly, without any real weight behind it. Clove sounds… wrecked, and the echo of it in his skull is what finally brings one of his hands down beneath his apron to tug his sweatpants down just a tiny bit. “Only convinces me further than I’m correct, anyway. You’re too needy to defy me, my love. It’s deliciously gratifying.”

“I’m not,” she whines. “I’m just–I’m just high.”

Gale gets a hand around himself finally, finally, and then he moans as he drags his nose back down through her hair to her core like the very high and needy man he is, like maybe he was made to match her in every way, this way especially–

“Are you, fuck, Gale, I want you to–”

“You think I won’t fuck you?” Gale growls, nipping at her thigh much more harshly, and Clove squeaks. 

“Do it, then,” she rasps, and Gale directs his next growl right into her cunt. 

“Give me one more, first.” 

“Fuck yes,” she hisses, and it makes Gale smile, even as he’s hard at work. If Clove had her hands, he probably wouldn’t be able to tease her like he is, but Clove can do nothing to increase the pressure on her clit other than roll her hips into him and risk throwing herself off balance, and Gale quickly has two hands on her waist putting a stop to that. No, his lover is disadvantaged and desperate and helpless like he’s never had her before, so he waits until she’s sobbing, begging, trembling, pounding on the cabinets again, before he gives in with a low groan,and licks her in firm, long strokes that push her over the edge nearly instantly. 

As soon as she exhales a long breath after all her gasping, and her legs have gone slack next to his head, Gale taps her on the waist.

“Clove.”

“Mm?”

“Stand up.”

The complaint is halfway out of her mouth when Gale yanks on her hips viciously, dragging her to the very edge of the counter in one sharp movement.

“Okay! Fuck, okay, I’m going,” she croaks, and Gale is glad he stood up before she hopped down, because she nearly topples over the second her feet touch the ground. 

“Careful, sweetheart,” he chuckles as he catches her, brushing some flour off her ass with the arm he has wound around her waist. “Are you able to stand for me?”

“Maybe,” she pants.

“What if I bend you over the counter? Could you handle that?”

Clove swallows. “Which counter?”

He just laughs. “Are your arms alright?” 

“Yeah,” she says, rolling her shoulders. “I can keep ‘em like this a while longer.”

“Good.” Gale slips behind her, feels up her chest blindly with his head buried in the hood of her sweatshirt. Her fingers grope curiously at his stomach, the first thing they’ve been able to reach since she ate his batter. “I rather like your hoodies, you know,” he murmurs. “They make you very soft and warm.”

Clove stiffens immediately. “The fuck are you going to do my hoodie? This is more expensive than a cheap pair of underwear, I’ll have you know.” 

“I have no intention of taking scissors to it, I assure you,” he says with a trace of humor, rotating her slowly, and nudging her ever so subtly back towards the counter. 

“Okay, well, I didn’t exactly know taking scissors to anything was like, your thing, but apparently it is, so forgive me for–”

“Clove,” Gale rasps as she bumps into the counter, and his cock grinds into her ass by mostly accident. “Bend over.”

She hesitates, and Gale smacks her ass with no hesitation at all. Flour falls off it.

“Fuck! It’s–Gale, there’s a mess,” she says, genuinely flustered, maybe even a little panicked. He runs a soothing hand down her spine, and tugs his pants down further down his legs with the other.

“And who made the mess?” he whispers. 

“Both of us,” she says immediately, and Gale’s palm lands on her ass again. A little more flour drifts to the floor.

“You made the mess, lover, so now you get to lay in it.” Gale has his pants down by his ankles now. He tugs the tie on his apron loose so he can pull it over his head and tosses it carelessly to the floor, and then she’s right there, and his cock is finally free, and he’s so close, but he holds himself back with gritted teeth. “Clove, lean forward. Now.”

She obeys in microscopic fractions of a degree, drawing it out as long as possible, staging her rebellion against getting a little flour on her fucking hoodie. 

“Oh, Clove,” Gale sighs, cock notched at her entrance, her inviting heat enveloping his head, but still not intruding yet. “Behave for me one more time, won’t you?”

“Why?” she says huskily as her chest finally rests on the counter, and she lowers her head to press one cheek to the granite. 

Gale sinks into her in one forceful thrust. Clove moans, and Gale swears, and then they both forget she ever asked a question.

One hand slipped between hers where they lay on her back, because he knows she wants to hold onto him, the other reaching up to grab her shoulder for leverage because he knows she wants that too, and then he fucks her like he is being mean to her even though he’s never loved her more, like he’s still in a bad mood even though she solved that ages ago, like he hates the mess she’s laying in when he’s actually grown quite fond of it.

For maybe twenty seconds, there is only the sound of their skin slapping together, their ragged breathing, Gale’s occasional little grunts. Both of them are utterly lost in the intensity, the relief, the pleasure, the way they’re high and fucking made for each other. It’s too much for words. Clove breaks the relative silence first, and when she does, it’s choked and barely comprehensible. 

“Gale, I need, my hands–”

She pushes her hips back as she says it, and Gale gets the message that her words very much did not convey, which is that she wants him to get her off–needs it, maybe. 

“Beg,” he says, and his voice is unrecognizable.

It comes out maybe the quickest Clove has ever spoken, so fast it fully overwhelms his senses before she even pauses to take a breath. Please touch me, please, please let me come again, I need it, you feel so fucking good, please please please, touch me Gale, fuck me, make me come, please–

Gale yanks on her hips one final time, adjusts her so there’s space between her and the counter for his hand to move from her shoulder to her clit, and Clove’s rambling devolves into a wail.

“Fuck, good girl, come for me,” Gale gasps, and he holds out with all the willpower he has left while driving into her like this, until he feels the tell-tale clenching, so fierce she’s almost forcing him out of her, hears her strangled yell, watches her back arch, and forces himself as deep as he can go before finally letting himself go. 

He collapses forward on her, knees giving up at last, scrambling to keep himself upright as the orgasm crashes through him in a seemingly endless wave. “Fuck, sorry,” he pants, both hands supporting himself on the counter to keep him off her, and elbow threatening to give out on him too. “I’ll, um, in a second–”

“I’m fine,” she grunts. “Relax. I’m good. Lay on me, if you want.”

So Gale does, for a couple minutes, at least. He goes down on his elbows, and rests his heavy head on her shoulder blade. Clove hums a little, off and on, just to let him know it’s alright. She does that a lot when Gale gets worried.

“I love you so much,” he mumbles.

“Love you more,” she slurs, a little drunkenly, and Gale smiles. 

It doesn’t take long for his strength to return to him. 

He frees her hands while she’s still flat on the counter, then leans down and wraps both arms around her torso to help haul her up. She helps only somewhat, and as soon as she’s on her feet she sags most of her weight back into him. Gale holds her as best he can, and brushes a little bit of the flour off the front of her sweatshirt. 

“You’re a mess,” Gale teases in a whisper. 

Clove laughs, rough and spent. “At least I don’t have to clean up the kitchen.”

“You don’t, hm?” Gale hums with a smile. 

“No. I think I’ll curl up on the couch, and maybe by the time that third gummy kicks in you’ll be able to bring me a slice of cake about it.”

“Oh my god,” Gale breathes. “We took another one, didn’t we?”

Clove turns her head and plants a wet smooch on his cheek. “Sure did.”

Gale spins her around suddenly, and pulls her into a fierce hug. “Clove, thank you. My night was very bleak before you came down here. I’m grateful.” 

“Yeah,” she sighs, clinging to him too. “Wake me up on purpose, next time.” 

He finds this an unlikely possibility, but buries a kiss in her hair for the offer anyway. “Go lay down,” he whispers. “I’ll bring you cake when it’s ready.” 

He is rewarded with a kiss, slow and sweet, before watching fondly as Clove totters off, up the stairs on wobbly legs to presumably rinse off and change what clothes of hers are left before she collapses on the couch. 

It’s a wonder how she always finds him in his darkest moments, halfway to hell already and staunchly unwilling to be guided back, and helps anyway. A fight, a fuck, a laugh, a kiss, a few kind words. Any one of them could be the cure, and she invariably knows the correct answer long before he does.

Bit of a miracle, finding a love like Clove’s, old enough to have grown roots and strong enough to crack the foundations of a house since the very beginning. Bit of a mystery how he ever manages to deserve her; bit of a blessing that it doesn’t fucking matter, because she’s not going anywhere, and he knows it. 

Chapter Text

It’s a funny old thing, how a normal week can become a nightmare so fucking fast. Like you’re counting down from ten, waiting for the anesthesia to kick in, and somewhere along the way you fall off a ledge–one that even if you knew was coming, you could still never have conceptualized the hard angle of, couldn’t have known how far there was to fall.

Ten. Car radiator blew out in the grocery store parking lot. Whole dramatic scene in front of a bunch of idiots who thought her car was on fire or something. Expensive repair.

Nine. Banged her knee. Again.  

Eight. Had to call the cops on a customer. Clove fucking hates cops, and she hated the customer even more for making her stoop to calling them. Beat herself up after because she felt like she should have been able to handle it herself, but she was working alone, and Karlach didn’t see her text, and none of her regulars were in, and her knee was very freshly fucked up, and she spotted the knife he had tucked into his waistband the second he walked in the door.

Seven. Gale’s car broke down. Clove had to go nab him from the side of a highway in her rental, and they went from two cars to zero in three days.

Six. A letter appeared in their mailbox, marked with no return address except her dad’s name. 

There was more, but Clove is too muddled to remember the rest now. Was there more? Is this the same week? Is she still herself, or just the tough but hollow shell of a very persistent insect the world finally managed to kill off?

Finally gave up on work the day the letter showed up. Karlach’s been flying solo for the three days since, because Shadowheart is on vacation. This is the only time table Clove has been able to keep straight in her head, because it’s the one she feels the most guilty about. 

Somewhere, on a variety of burners near the back of her burnt out mind, she feels guilty about a lot of things. It’s just that the guilt is but a forgettable afterthought to the paralyzing anxiety, the black despair, and the simmering anger so deep and vicious it frightens her right down to her toes, so the guilt doesn’t get much air time.

Hard to say what she’s doing besides work, at the moment. Or at least, what she’s doing that’s of any value to anyone, including herself.

Sleeping, crying, staring at the wall, walking, isolating to an extreme, letting both body and soul fall into rot and decay, walking some more.

Useless.

Walks to the river happen sporadically. Whenever her brain fancies it. She walks other places, too. Wherever her fanciful feet and her bad knee carry her. Sometimes, it takes her a while to find her way back. Sometimes, a jaunt she claimed would take an hour turns into three or four, and Gale inevitably calls her, just trying to make sure she’s okay, and Clove inevitably ignores him. 

It’s all on a burner somewhere.

Maybe, though, just maybe, she should have answered this time in particular, as it would appear she’s well and truly lost. Still a little stoned from the edible she ate before she left, standing on a street corner in the brutal late afternoon sun, knee throbbing hot and loud, staring at two street signs she doesn’t recognize the names of, and now her phone is dead.

Oh well. Hard to be too concerned, when you’re stoned and suicidal. 

Clove sits down on the scorching metal of a bus stop bench with a quiet little sigh, and she stares at the quaint little hardware store across the street, all the hunched little old men pottering in and out of it with all the silly solemn intent in the world, and she waits. 

For what? She wonders. 

A meteor? A burst of inspiration? Her dad to pop out of the sidewalk right in front of her and drag her back down to hell with him? A heat stroke? The street names to become suddenly familiar?

Six buses stop in front of her, then leave. 

Clove’s head is throbbing in symphony with her knee now.

Heat stroke? She hopes.

An increasingly urgent need for water is what finally gets her off the bench. Desirous of death or not, a mouth as dry as hers is fucking uncomfortable. Her legs feel less steady and far more numb than they should for someone with an unknown distance to walk ahead of them. Her head throbs so painfully as she limps across the street that she wonders if she’s going to pass out on the asphalt. 

The hardware store is blessedly cool, far too bright, chock full of people and a bit like hell itself. 

“Hey, can I help you find something?”

Clove comes to a screeching halt. Wakes up a little. Tears flood her eyes. 

Get me the fuck out of here. Get me home. 

“Yeah, uh, any chance I could use a phone? Mine’s dead, and I’m lost.”

--

The drive home is suspiciously quiet. 

Not that Clove saying nothing is unusual, but Gale has had plenty to say this past week. Plenty of concerns to voice. Plenty of support to offer. Plenty of kind words she’s barely heard. 

Distantly, Clove is aware this is killing him. 

Only been a few days since she went off the deep end, and he looks like he’s dying–gaunt, pale, all dark circles and overgrown beard. He looks like shit. He looks like a man who doomed himself by dating someone like Clove, and is accepting his imminent demise without any fight at all. Grimly determined to go down with the ship, and for what?

Clove told him to leave. She doesn’t recall much from that day, but she remembers what she told him to do, the force with which she said it, what his face looked like in the immediate aftermath, and absolutely nothing after that. 

And yet, for reasons unknown, he is still here. Picking her up from a hardware store that his GPS tells her is eight miles from their home, even though he has very obviously been crying, and is so visibly sleep deprived he probably shouldn’t even be driving. Clove does feel guilty. Somewhere. It’s on one of the burners. One of the big ones. It’s just her whole fucking brain is on fire, and while Gale may very desperately wish to, he cannot put the flames out.

He did bring her water, though, and this small offering of help, Clove accepts. He brought her two bottles, his own and hers, and she downs them both.

The relief from the headache is instantaneous, and for whatever reason, it makes her cry. Gale reaches for her uninjured knee, then snatches his hand back like he remembered they’re not on touching terms anymore. 

“Thank you for picking me up,” Clove croaks. 

Beggar.

Gale sighs, but his hand lands on her knee a few seconds later.

Clove pops an edible as soon as they walk in the door. Gale sets his keys in the little tray, and perches carefully on a stool at the breakfast bar. 

“Are you going to jump off a bridge on one of these walks, Clove?”

He sounds… tired. Just tired. Exclusively tired. Resigned to the concept of being utterly unequal to the task of keeping Clove alive. Maybe that’s why it’s the first sentence all week Clove has actually heard every word of. Gale is giving up on her, too.

Clove shifts from one foot to the other, still chewing her edible and suddenly very self conscious of it. She swallows. “I was kind of hoping a heat stroke would do me in, actually.”

“Is there no reason for you to stay anymore?” he asks, sidestepping her joke so entirely his voice breaks. 

“Not if he has any say in it.”

“Clove–”

She is already gone, back up the stairs, back to bed, to her blankets, to sleep, to unrestful oblivion.

--

“Clove, you’re fucking killing him. You’re killing me. You’ve given up on your entire life over one letter from an old man who is not worth anything, much less your goddamn life. I love you, dude, but come on.” 

Of course it would be Karlach, doing what nobody else is brave enough to: telling Clove off.

“I’m not killing anybody,” she squeaks, already crying, curled up tight in bed under a blanket, as small as she can be, in the wild hope that Karlach will simply forget she’s there.

“Have you seen Gale lately? Have you talked to him?”

Clove doesn’t reply. 

“Yeah. You fucking know.”

“I’m scared.”

“Yeah, that’s why you’ve got me, and Gale, and Shadowheart, and all our scary fucking regulars who would all take a fucking bullet for you, babe. Can’t you trust your people a little more than this? Did one guy with a knife really undo all that? What’s even going to happen if your dad shows up? What’s really going to happen? Fucking kill him if you want to. I don’t care. How old is he? In his eighties? Don’t tell me you couldn’t take an eighty year old.”

Clove shakes her head. “I just wanted him to leave me alone. I thought I escaped him forever.”

“Yeah, and one letter doesn’t mean you didn’t. Did you even read it?”

“Of course not.”

“Yeah, you fucking threw it away, because it doesn’t fucking matter, and if you had any brains, you’d have spent the last week celebrating how fucking great your life is now just to spite him.”

“But I don’t have any brains, so I’m here,” Clove spits. 

“Yeah, exactly,” Karlach retorts, tweaking her ear. “Here you are. So change something, babe. Stop scaring the shit out of Gale. Stop scaring the shit out of me. Come back to work; our regulars won’t shut the fuck up about you. Your dad is not on your goddamn doorstep, and you fought real hard for a life without him in it, so maybe consider fucking living it.”

A long pause. A sniffle.

“I don’t feel very good, Mama K,” Clove mumbles, voice small as it gets.

“I know,” Karlach says, softening, ruffling her hair. “Would be nice if you’d let someone help you feel better.”

--

Gale doesn’t come to bed the night Karlach comes to scold Clove like a child. Maybe Karlach told him to let Clove cool off for a bit. Maybe he can’t bear climbing into bed next to her anymore. She wakes in the early afternoon the next day to breakfast and still-warm tea sitting on the nightstand, though, so he’s not completely given up yet. 

You’re fucking killing him.

Her own, private, murky observations were one thing. Karlach’s are another. It was an uncomfortable confrontation with the truth, fed to her much more directly than through her own muddled thoughts, and in the moment, it was too much. White-out conditions. Now, though? The truth pounds in her chest stronger than her heart: that above her rage, her guilt, her despair, her fear, above every emotion wreaking havoc on her brain the past week, there is still one emotion that can trump it all. 

You don’t fucking touch him.  

Clove is killing Gale, and it may as well be her dad guiding her hand. 

It takes nearly an hour, but she manages to text him, Karlach’s voice ringing in her ear once again. Would be nice if you’d let someone help you feel better.

Well, Clove does know something that would feel pretty good right about now. 

The door creaks open less than a minute later, and Gale peeks his head through, cautious and confused, like he’s half convinced he hallucinated the text. Clove is a puddly excuse of a human being, melting into a bed she hasn’t left for nearly a week, smelling of all the showers she has not taken, a bowl that is both filthy and cashed two feet from her head, box of tissues sharing her pillow like a cat, but all that matters is she has two arms outstretched, reaching for him, asking for him. She endures the several excruciating seconds as Gale’s brain processes the fact that this is actually fucking real, and then he practically flies into her arms.

Clove is on her side, so Gale slots himself in next to her, stomach to stomach, clinging to her with every part of his body he can. He cries immediately, face buried in her shoulder, and Clove cries with him. Wordless. Exhausted. Together.

They fall asleep like that, Clove soaking his hair and Gale soaking her hoodie, wrapped up as tight as they can manage. 

The red-orange light streaming in the window when she wakes up tells Clove the sun is about to set. Gale is still asleep.

He has, despite how close they were when they fell asleep, seemingly only gotten closer to her. Clove is on her back now, and Gale is more or less on top of her, head still buried in her shoulder, legs tangled with hers. Snoring softly–a sound that is both pleasantly and sharply familiar.

Gale has not slept well since all this shit started. His nightmares have become what Clove’s nightmares are made of, a nightly ritual turned horror movie: laying stiffly beside him in the dark as he whimpers and thrashes his way through the darkest hours of the night, and just… letting it happen, because they weren’t on touching terms.

Now, he doesn’t so much as stir, but Clove feels the urge to calm him anyway. To make up for the nights she ignored his distress, to make up for all of it, let him know she’s there with him in his dreams, and trying, trying, finally fucking trying to come back to him in the real world, too.

It’s a silly, useless gesture, but as he snores on her chest, Clove begins to hum to him. Her throat tightens immediately, and she chokes her way through the first few minutes, but then she settles into it.

It’s funny. It kind of soothes her, too.

She fails to even notice that the snoring stopped. Gale doesn’t move a muscle, and his breath stays perfectly even, but eventually he sniffles very quietly, and Clove glances down, and his eyes are open, shiny with unshed tears.

This chokes her up again, so persistently she’s forced to stop. Gale fists a hand in the stomach of her hoodie, white knuckled and trembling. 

“Thank you,” he whispers. 

Clove nods.

He says nothing else. Worried about scaring her away, perhaps. Popping the bubble. Losing the moment.

Deserved. Clove owes him many things before he owes her any more of his words.

A deep breath. A voice quieter than a whisper. A shaky start. “You’re worth staying for.”

A soft sob.

It’s a start, nonetheless.

--

You told him you’d stay, you told him you’d stay, you told him you’d stay, you told him you’d stay.

Clove only somewhat regrets the lengths she went to in order to turn off the fucking faucet on that particular thought. Even if the reprieve was only for a half hour, while the stinging was at its worst. It was still worth it. It was.

Even if the thought is back now, and Gale’s going to have a heart attack about her arm, and the whole point was not to fucking kill him, jesus christ, you told him you’d stay–

Clove slams her eyes shut, curls up tighter, rubs her temples, and tries to ignore the sound of the door opening and closing downstairs. 

Gale went back to work today finally. At her insistence. He only agreed because he trusted her, and now her arm has been sliced to shreds and she still wants to die and he’s home and her entire life, in all its chicken wire and car tire glory, appears through her eyes just a smoldering pile of ash.

Gale opens the bedroom door, then freezes. Clove didn’t bother putting a hoodie back on. No point. She’s curled up on the bed, arms wrapped around her knees, chin resting atop them, staring resolutely at the comforter, refusing to acknowledge the big fat traitorous tear leaking down her cheek. She feels like a fucking bug. Like the world’s smallest form of life under the world’s biggest boot.

Gale comes unstuck, and Clove flinches. He approaches the bed slowly. Sits down next to her. His hands are trembling on his knees. “Did you clean them?” he asks quietly. 

Clove shakes her head. 

“Come with me, please.”

It’s a very gentle order, but it’s an order from the world’s largest boot, so Clove obeys.

Gale has a fully stocked first aid kit, because of course he does. Gale is a prepared and responsible person, and he has, oh so unfortunately for him, made himself responsible for the absolute trainwreck that is Clove. 

Clove could have used the first aid kit herself, of course; she just wanted her arm to keep stinging. So she sits on the toilet, and Gale sits on the edge of the bathtub as he washes her arm for her, slathers it with antibiotic numbing cream for her, wraps it in gauze for her. Clove doesn’t flinch again, not even once, but she grinds her teeth the whole way through.

Gale sits, after, with her arm still cradled in his hands, frowning at it. “Clove, what happened?” he asks, clearly intending it to sound gentle, but his voice is too sand-papery for that.

Nowhere to hide now. Lying proficiency gone out with the tide. Clove clears her throat. “It’s, just, um… I got pretty deep in this hole, you know, and, uh. It feels harder to keep climbing the further up I make it, and I… I dunno, I just get so fucking tired sometimes. It gets to be too much, and I wanted my brain to shut the fuck up for a second, and this was… distracting.” 

“Could something else be distracting, perhaps?”

“Of course,” she snorts, “but nothing is going to feel better than this when you’re as fucking angry with yourself as I am all the time.”

Gale considers this for a long solemn moment. “Are you going to do it again, then?”

Clove is taken aback. She was waiting for more orders, but Gale’s just asking questions, with all the inherent judgement of asking if she knows if it’s meant to rain tomorrow.

“Um. I don’t know.” 

“What did you use?”

“Razors.”

Gale pulls a face. “Why do you have razors?” 

Of all the goddamn things to confuse him. “I bought them, you idiot.” 

“For what? This?”

“Yeah.” 

“This is the sort of thing one… plans for?” 

Clove suddenly understands what he’s really asking, and goes a little nauseous. “No. No plans. Impulse buy. Impulse decision. Rough day.” 

“I can try to stay home from–”

“No. No more babysitting.” 

He bows his head for a heavy minute. “Clove, this… makes me sad,” he says wearily, looking back up at her with eyes that paint a far clearer picture than his words.

Clove swallows, then has to avert her gaze. “I’ll try not to do it again. I’m sorry.” 

“Don’t apologize,” he says softly. “I’m not upset with you, dearest.”

This simple little sentence throws Clove’s whole world in reverse. She exhales slowly. Drops her shoulders. Tilts her head thoughtfully. “You know, I don’t think anyone’s ever not been upset with me about it before? I think that, um–I think that’s good, actually. It helps. Just because, you know, thinking people are going to get upset always makes it worse, because you’re already so upset with yourself anyway. Just feels like another reason to punish yourself.”

“I would prefer to be neither judge nor executioner, thank you,” Gale murmurs, eyes on her arm again. 

“Gale, I’d jump in front of a fucking train for you. Do you know that?” 

Gale shakes his head, but it gets a smile out of him. Just a little one. “I would quite like you to do the opposite.”

--

As far as grand gestures during the worst depressive episode of her life go, Clove thinks this is pretty impressive. Following Karlach’s advice, once again. Keep it simple. Keep it easy.

Order takeout (fuck cooking). Tidy up the living room (even Gale has fallen behind on the housework lately). Take a goddamn shower (how long has it been, jesus christ) . Change into clean sweatpants. Pack a bowl. Light a candle.

Breezy.

It’s the world’s shittiest date. The fact that Clove dragged her miserable ass out of bed for an entire hour and tried to be a mildly decent partner is the real surprise here. Gale might just pass out from the shock. 

He calls her on his way home, of course. To ask if she wants food, of course. Gets all worried when she says she isn’t hungry, of-fucking-course. Clove has to break into the freshly-packed bowl mid-phone call to keep from losing her mind, but she makes it through, and then Gale walks in the door, phone still held to his ear, and freezes again.

Clove ends the call, hauls herself off the couch, and shuffles towards the entryway. She loses her courage at the halfway mark, and comes to an awkward halt with another ten feet still between them.

“Surprise, I’m downstairs,” she mutters lamely.

Gale promptly bursts into tears, but he’s laughing a little bit, too. The combination thaws her in an instant.

“Come here then, silly man,” Clove says with achingly fond exasperation.

The food is only mildly warm by the time they get to it, and the candle is making an annoying hissing noise so they snuff it out, but Clove is downstairs, on the couch, clean and fed and smiling, so Gale is smiling too. 

Clove kind of thought they would watch TV, but they never even turn it on. They just talk. Endlessly. On and on and on. Two weeks of unspoken words filling the air until long after the takeout is gone, and the bowl is cashed, and Clove is snuggled down into the couch, legs slung across Gale’s lap.

“You look happy, my love.”

Clove’s cheeks burn. “It’s a good night.” 

“Because you made it good,” he adds softly. 

“Yeah. I even showered. I smell nice again.”

“You always smell nice.” 

Clove rolls her eyes. “Freak.”

--

Alright, so this was a bad idea. Maybe she knew that beforehand. Maybe she knew going back to work knocked her flat on her ass, and she didn’t have the fucking energy for a walk to the river. Maybe she did it anyway. 

Sue her. 

A text chimes its arrival while she’s sitting on her rock–Gale checking in, as always. Clove stares hard at it for a while before texting him back. Not as hard as asking for a hug, but not easy, either.

Gale greets her with a kiss when she slides into the passenger seat, though, and isn’t that something? Clove pulls him back in for seconds just because she can, because he wants her to, because it’s just so fucking nice to be on touching terms again. In fact, they collapse onto the couch together in perfect silent synchronicity when they get home, and keep right on kissing. Fully clothed and wrapped around one another, touching just to touch, kissing just to kiss. 

Before her walk, Clove was not having a very good day. Brain went a bit wobbly, slid backwards a few agonizing feet, so she tried to walk it off. And maybe you could say it was ‘unsuccessful’ because she had to tap out halfway through, and sure, maybe she knew she shouldn’t have gone in the first place, but it led to this, and now she’s not even tired anymore. She could do this all night. What kind of fuck up leads to something as sweet as this?

Eventually, Gale tugs her upstairs. Crawls into bed with her, face to face, hands roaming unhurriedly over all the fabric still between them, kissing a little less constantly but still enough to keep them satisfied. 

“It feels like it’s been longer than three weeks,” he admits, like his best kept secret, thumb brushing her cheek. 

Clove nods. “Yeah. I know.” 

“Are you glad?” he whispers. “To be here with me now?”

A fierce kiss. A whole slew of them. “Fuck yes.”

He smiles, but it’s suddenly a weak, fragile thing. Something’s coming, something bad, a storm on her perfectly calm night, no no no–  

“You told me to leave you.”

Clove breathes through the self harm urges with the willpower of a hurricane. Misses the self destruct button by a clear six inches. “I know. I’m sorry. I don’t want you to leave me.” 

“I believe you. I just… would like to know why you said it.” 

“Didn’t want him near you.”

“He doesn’t scare me, my love. Not like he scares you. Can you not trust me to take care of myself?”

“I don’t think it’s about you being able to take care of yourself. Think it’s just that it feels like if he touches a part of my life, it’s poisoned against me forever. Like, if I give him an inch, he’ll take the whole mile. He’d find a way to ruin this, if he had even a sliver of a chance, and we’d both wind up worse off for it than if you just left me because I told you to.”

Gale collects both her hands and hums into the space between her palms, brow furrowed. “We’ve weathered an awful lot together, haven’t we? I rather think our bond is too strong for him.”

“You’ve weathered a lot. I’ve put you through hell, Gale. I’m really sorry.” 

“I’d go through it again in a heartbeat. You know that, don’t you? I never contemplated leaving. Not even when you told me to. He cannot take me from you, my love.”

“Yeah. Fuck. Yeah, lover. I know.” 

Gale kisses her again then, lets her funnel the emotions out through her lips, lets her crawl on top of him, doesn’t mind her snotty tears all over his face, doesn’t even object when she grinds against his thigh a little bit. She’s still mostly on top of him when they fall asleep, still fully clothed and kissing just to kiss until they physically can’t anymore.

--

This new little ‘kissing to sleep’ ritual is lovely, and a marked improvement on certain former rituals, but it only takes a couple nights to lead to its entirely predictable conclusion, which is Clove waking up with Gale already halfway to coming all over her in his sleep. One hand has crawled up her shirt and is groping feverishly, the other managed to get his cock pulled through his pants and his underwear and is now moving, jerky and desperate, right against her thigh, and all the while his hot lips mouth at the base of her neck, less like kissing and more like drooling. Dead asleep.

Through all the blood rushing south, Clove tries to imagine what she would have done a month ago. 

Grabbed his hand? Fucked him? Punished him? Rewarded him? Teased him? Used him?

Which one should she do now?

No fucking clue. She’s still half asleep, riding on instinct and muscle memory, and all she knows how to do these days is kiss him, so she reaches down, finds his saliva-slick chin with two greedy fingers, and guides his lips to hers. Gale is soft as butter for her for about four seconds, until it’s clear he is on the verge of melting right onto her tongue, and then he wakes up. 

All it takes is the little gasp, the tension flooding his muscles, his lips, his tongue, and awareness slams into her in one brutal wave. 

“Fuck, sorry,” she rasps, yanking away from him. 

“No, come back,” he chokes out. “Please.”

“Gale, I–I don’t know, don’t know what I’m…”

Gale blinks some of the sleep out of his eyes, frowning slightly. “Oh, of course. You don’t have to, you’re just…”

“You woke me up,” she blurts stupidly.

His expression as he glances down at his hand suggests he thought someone else was stroking his cock. He shrinks right in front of her eyes. “Ah. I’m… I’m terribly sorry.” 

Clove does grab his hand, then, but only to prevent it from abandoning its task. “Wait,” she squeaks, and it’s all she can manage at the moment, so she hopes her face says the rest. After a long pause, eyes locked and searching, Gale tentatively begins moving his hand under hers again, stroking himself in a silent question. Clove nods, removes her hand from his, and slips it down her sweatpants instead.

Gale groans as his eyes track the movement, wraps his spare arm around her waist, and tugs her closer. “Kiss me?” he breathes, and Clove nods again.

Reward or punishment, tease or pleasure-chasing, it’s difficult to tell the difference now. Just matters that her hand told his hand to stay, her hand brought his unconscious lips to hers and cradles him to her still, her hand is pressed ever so gently on the gas and letting them both go, go, go. That’s all Gale ever needs. To know he’s wanted. Needed. Allowed to want and need in return.

The kissing is clumsy and interrupted by ragged gasps, and their knuckles keep knocking together in the limited space between their bodies, but even for all the lacking grandeur of two people getting themselves off while fully clothed and nearly chipping their teeth in the process, it feels like fucking heaven. It’s loud and consuming and the perfect amount of uncomfortable and there’s no space for anything else. Just this. Just them. 

The fumbling even unburies Clove’s instinct to thread her fingers into Gale’s hair, encourages her to close her fist as their knuckles grate painfully against each other once more, unlocks the bravery to tug a little when Gale has to part from her once more to suck in a frantic breath like he hasn’t felt the relief of oxygen in weeks. 

Clove’s muscle memory is effective enough to tip him over the edge, and Gale comes hard enough for a little warm stripe to make the long journey all the way up to her chin. 

“Fuck,” he pants, eyes flying open, wiping his hand on his pants. “Can I help you, please?”

Clove just stares at him. I don’t know what to have you do. 

Evidently, Gale needs no direction. He yanks her soiled t-shirt up, bunches it around her armpits, and shuffles downwards until his face is even with her chest. Then, he glances back up at her, awaiting permission, already kneading hungrily at his intended meal. “Allow me?”

Clove barely has time to nod before her left nipple is being rolled against the roof of his mouth, and the heat of him is like fucking flames, and her back arches into the sensation so fiercely she feels it start to cramp. As the heat settles to a more comfortable simmer, and the pleasure shifts from sharp to soft, her fingers finally, finally remember the rhythm she likes best.

From there, Gale only has to give her a tiny, broken, needy moan, and she clings to his head fiercely with both hands as her back arches once more. The headrush is overwhelming in a way Clove has never felt before–not because it’s anywhere in the realm of one of her best orgasms, but because it’s just so much good after so much fucking bad. 

Together, with him, close and soft and needy, her Gale, together.

Gale is there just as she begins to crash, of course, crushing her in a hug before the first sob has escaped containment, and then Clove nudges his shirt up with feeble, shaking fingers so she can feel his skin against hers.

“I’d still jump in front of a train for you,” she mumbles, exhausted, into his shoulder.

“I’d still rather you didn’t, and I’m beginning to question the reasoning behind your devotion. I woke you in very impolite fashion.”

“Didn’t mind.” 

Gale is silent for a long moment. 

“I really liked you being there with me in my dreams,” he admits quietly. “It felt as if you’d… found your way in, just like your humming did.”

This unburies another instinct. A desire. Or a dream, perhaps better named. One much longer buried, but much stronger in its resurfaced state. Heat pools in her core again. Clove lifts her head.

“Can I tell you a secret?” she whispers. 

Gale's eyes are round with surprise at her sudden intensity. “I’d love nothing more.”

“I want to be there with you in your dreams.”

He blinks once, twice. “As in…?” 

“That night I woke you up drunk, I fantasized about it. Taking you before you were conscious.”

Gale swallows. “You… could.”

“I wouldn’t. Not unless you asked.” 

“I’d beg, if you wanted.”

“Fuck. Really?”

Gale nods, and Clove kisses him like he means everything in the fucking world to her, because he does, and it beats jumping in front of a train, anyway.

--

There’s no better cover for feeling like you’re relearning everything you’ve ever known about having sex than the other person being asleep. 

Gale is blissfully unaware of her fumbling, her shaking hands, her long pauses where she has a silent chat with herself about whether or not she is actually capable of this.

It’s certainly fucking terrifying. Gale agreed to this while he was awake, and he is not awake now. The thought of him regaining consciousness with her inside him is as nauseating as it is thrilling, but at the same time, Clove wonders if perhaps, despite its absurdity, this is actually the best time for them to try this. 

It’s been a very weird month. It stands to reason that shaking it from their shoulders would require somewhat unorthodox means.

Clove spends a lot of this private, courage-gathering time just looking at him. Admiring him in a way that would certainly make him blush and squirm if he was awake, but in his sleep, she can drink him in properly, as slow she likes, and he remains none the wiser. On his back, naked (planned), limbs akimbo, mouth ajar, hair a wild halo on the pillow, lovely silver streaks brought out by the moonlight from the window. She can even look closer, if she wants to, which she does–the stretch marks, the moles, the little patches of hair in unexpected places, the scars, the bite mark she left in his shoulder two mornings ago. She could draw a map of him, her Gale. The same Gale who’s been by her side the past month, keeping her fed and hydrated and loved and alive, and still he wants to be hers when he’s not even awake to know how she’s claiming him.

The sight of him alone is enough to get her between his legs, trailing fingertips up and down his thighs, nudging at his dreams, letting him know she’s arrived to join him there. In his sleep, Gale smiles. Just the laziest lift of one corner of his mouth, only for the space of one snore, but she’s watching close enough to catch anything.

Clove straps into her harness before she gets any further–a habit she learned very quickly after a few awkward fumbles in the heat of the moment. She could still count on two hands the number of times they’ve used this gear, but it’s already familiar enough to settle her nerves.

It takes another precious couple minutes of admiring him before she is brave enough for the next step. She traces the lines of his legs or his hips or his belly, coaxes more smiles out of him–and on one particularly lovely occasion, a perfect little hum. She watches him grow half hard from her very mild attentions with so much fondness she almost wants to wake him up just to tell him she loves him. 

Fuck. Can’t be taken from her, indeed. Her dad can never change the simple fact that Gale is fucking hers, and he wants to be hers. It’s an unflappable thing, their love. An inevitable tide, creeping back to shore over and over forever, no matter how far one of them may get pulled out to sea.

The finger she presses lightly to his hole is meant as a quiet knock on the door, a very subtle hello to his slumbering mind, so naturally Gale moans like she is already fully fucking him, and she has to suppress a laugh so loud it would wake the whole block up.

“Slut,” she whispers affectionately as she presses inside. 

It’s a near thing, Gale not waking up. He thrashes for a little bit like he might be right on the edge of it, but Clove keeps her finger still, and eventually, he calms down, and she gets to work.

The muscle memory comes easy, for this part at least. It makes sense, she supposes. Been working him open a lot longer than she’s been fucking him, and Gale has no pretenses to hide behind now. He is unabashed, unashamed, fully hard, loud, and Clove just drinks, drinks, drinks. 

There is something to be said for the lack in a depressive tailspin, a crushing absence of anything but excessive self loathing that drives you to unspeakable lengths trying to feel something else, anything else, for an hour, a minute, just a fucking second. 

There is something to be said for the happy ending that can be earned, too, with the right amount of support and time and effort and luck, where the good can be so plentiful it overflows. Like if Gale had not stuck with her through this past month in particular, Clove finger fucking him in his sleep would be less enjoyable, and sure, maybe it’s silly, but to her, it’s real. Their love, their tenacity, their hard work, paying off in the exact way they chose for themselves. Gale being needed unconditionally, and Clove being the one who needs him. 

Second finger is smooth sailing, Gale fully bought in and floating along with her in his dreams, so easy to prep when he’s this relaxed. By the time Clove thinks he’s ready, she has found enough faith in herself to know she’s right. 

It seems a little ridiculous, she muses as she lines herself up with him, that she got this far without waking him. A little like he should have woken up at the first finger, at his first slutty little moan, at her muted laughter. Like maybe she should have fucked this up somehow on her first try, but so far… 

Gale’s brow furrows as she pushes inside, and she freezes. Are you okay?

She wants to ask with every fiber of her being. Can’t fucking ask. Clove reaches up, very tentatively, to cup his cheek. Gale nuzzles into her palm, and the tension melts out of him immediately.

“I’ve got you, it’s okay,” she whispers under her breath, watching every muscle in his face closely as she sinks further into him, and this time his features contort in pure pleasure.

And isn’t that something? Clove is fucking Gale in his sleep. Very slowly, very gently, cradling his cheek with one hand, gripping his waist with the other, a little unsure but hips still rocking into him just hard enough that each time she bottoms out, a little involuntary huff is forced from Gale’s lungs, and it escapes every time, because he is fucking asleep. Making soft little noises, nose scrunched with his pleasure, still not tense or squirming, utterly relaxed, unselfconscious, pliant, hers. Christ, fucking hers.

The noises grow in volume and frequency the longer Clove fucks him for, until somewhere in the constant breathy moans and incoherent mumbling, just as her hips connect with his ass once more, she deciphers a tiny, broken, whimpered ‘Clove’, barely audible but definitely fucking there, and her blood flashes fucking molten.

“Fuck!” Clove gasps, muscle memory taking over for her once more, taking over entirely, pulling almost all the way out and slamming back into him in one smooth, forceful motion that looks like it sends shockwaves all the way up Gale’s spine. He shudders hard, cries out, and then his eyes flutter open. 

There are probably a thousand and one emotions to be read in his expression, but all Clove can see is the smile, the relief, the joy, the pride. God, the fucking pride. It brings Clove to her elbows on top of him, muscle memory still not breaking its stride as she steals a kiss to steel herself against the overwhelm. 

“Hello,” Gale whispers happily, sweetened impossibly further by a tiny little moan as punctuation. 

“Fuck, oh, this is–” she gasps out.

“Slow down,” he interrupts gently, and Clove stops dead. 

Fuck. 

“I didn’t say stop, my love,” Gale chuckles, running a soothing hand up and down her side. “Just slow down. Savor this with me.”

Clove heaves an anxious, shuddery sigh, and settles back into the easier pace from before she woke him, which really was quite lovely.

“Hello,” Gale whispers once more. 

It melts her just as much the second time. “Hi, baby.”

“You feel…” His eyes drift shut for a moment, and the hand squeezes sharply at her side. “... incredible.”

“No pain?”

“No. It’s perfect. How I woke up was… God, Clove. All of this. You are perfect. Thank you.” 

Clove smiles, lets the mischief shine out of the crinkles around her eyes, strokes his cheek. “And here I thought you’d be hard to please in the middle of the night. You’re usually a monster when you get woken up before your alarms.” 

“I just have to wake up in the right mood.”

“Yeah, and I had you in the mood in your dreams, didn’t I, lover?”

Gale reaches for a kiss that she allows, groaning his agreement quietly into her mouth. Clove threads a hand into his hair, and uses her grip there to break him away from the kiss.

“You’re as much of a slut asleep as you are awake, by the way. Our neighbors probably heard you being spread open.”

Gale shivers, flushes, and Clove smiles wickedly. She tugs once at his hair. 

“Oh, you like that idea.”

“Did you like doing that to me while I was asleep?” he asks, a fervent whisper just as she dips for a kiss. 

“Mmph,” is the only available reply with her tongue in his mouth, but when she finally comes up for air, she nods vigorously. “Yes. Scary as hell, but I loved it. You were so vocal, but your body was so… relaxed. All boneless. My own little rag-doll. Fuck, it was hot.”

Gale groans as his eyes flutter closed again. His cock is stiff enough to be poking her in the belly as she leans over him.

“How does that make you feel, lover?” Clove breathes. 

“Spoiled.”

Clove smiles like she won the fucking lottery and then some. “Yeah? All you want is to be my toy, and I gave you what you wanted, is that it?” 

He hums his agreement. “I don’t have to do anything; you just want me anyway,” he adds with a little contented sigh, like it’s his favorite little fantasy, eyes still closed so he doesn’t see Clove’s responding frown. 

“You never have to do anything for me to want you.” 

Gale nudges his hips against hers where they’ve stalled out, squeezes impatiently at her sides, frowning a little himself, because he’d suddenly much rather get fucked than have this conversation, apparently.

Fine.

Clove grabs his right hand, and wraps it around the base of his shaft. “Squeeze,” she orders hoarsely. 

Gale obeys, whimpering a little. 

“Don’t move it.”

Another whimper. The moment she takes her hand away, his hand twitches, so her hand returns, and settles in for the long haul.

She brushes his cheek with her other hand, then drives her hips into him in one quick, brutal thrust, and Gale cries out. His hand tries to move again, and her grip tightens.

“More,” he rasps. “Fuck me, please. Clove–ah!”

Clove slams into him again. Finds a slow but brutal pace she can handle for a while, and then finds his other hand and pins it above his head. Gale tips his head back into the mattress, throat glistening with sweat and neck muscles straining, moaning high and strangled. Clove leans down close to his ear. 

“Do I have to fuck you in your sleep every single night to convince you I want you just because you’re you, lover?”

Gale tries to thrash, but he’s a bit trapped at the moment. Clove’s hips punish him for the attempt, and he wails. 

“I’ll spoil you forever, for as long as I can. You’re going to be wanted forever. Needed forever. If you ever have a month like I just had, I’ll be there on the other side ready to fuck you until you feel better. You’re mine, baby. All mine. Never have to do anything.”

Clove is panting hard by the end, trying to talk and fuck at the same time, and Gale is… sobbing, so maybe she’s got her point across already, maybe she could shut up and really fuck him now, but she is always so very greedy. 

“Gale, say it for me. Tell me you don’t have to do anything for me to want you. I want you just like you are. I want you forever.” 

“My hand, please, let me–”

“Tell me, baby.”

Gale’s eyes blink open, and the desperation is clear and so are the tears, but there is also defiance, the tiniest hint of mischief. 

“I want you the way you want me, my love. Unconditionally, and forever.”

“Gale.”

“Fuck me.” 

Clove sits up suddenly. Releases both his hands. Gale looks momentarily panicked, which is highly satisfying. Torturously slow, while her hips sit entirely unmoving, she slathers lube on one hand before wrapping it around the portion of his cock he’s not covering, thumb positioned right where she wants it. She rests the other hand on his hip, the ghost of a grip threatening to bite. 

Gale swallows audibly in the ensuing silence. Clove smiles.

“Close your eyes, lover. Relax. Let me take care of you, just like I did in your dreams.” 

He hesitates. “You’ll fuck me?”

“I’ll do whatever the fuck I want to you.”

Gale whimpers, and closes his eyes. His body isn’t rag-dolled quite like it was when he was unconscious, but he’s trying for her, and that’s all that matters.

Clove starts slow, and doesn’t speed up. Thrusts gentle and even, just like before. Using her vice grip on his hip to guide him, but not pulling. Her hand doesn’t move, preventing Gale’s from moving too, and instead, her thumb moves in agonizing, firm strokes to match her hips, right over his favorite spot on the underside, just beneath the head, over and over and over. 

Gale is ready to come, whole body almost certainly screaming with it, struggling to keep from tensing and squirming, trying so hard to clench around the little knot of his orgasm sitting in his abdomen, and that’s how Clove wants to keep him for a little while. 

“Clove, Clove, fuck, it’s too much, more.”

Clove smiles. “Can’t have too much and not enough, lover. Which one is it?” 

Gale sobs, and gives up on talking–that big, smart, mathematically-inclined brain of his accepting that the only way to come is to let her make him come. Can’t chase it himself, can’t make her speed up, just has to let her tease it out of him however she wants. Well… he accepts it for a bit, anyway.

He comes away from and back to this conclusion over and over, actually, like that beautiful brain is driving him in a lovely little circle, and he’s too fucking lost in it to care. Struggling and squirming and whimpering and begging, then melting back into pliancy, incoherence, lazy pleasure, something an awful lot like sleep, and the cycle repeats.

Clove doesn’t mind. She can wait. She chose a pace she has the stamina to keep up for a good long while, and Gale is wearing himself out more than she is. This is her reward, after all, for making it through this month, for all her willpower and her tenacity and her bravery. She gets to take Gale apart like this, gets to have him, gets to know all the way in her bones that nobody can take him away. 

It takes until his whole body begins to shake with exhaustion for Gale to give it up permanently. He melts, and does not wake back up. Her little rag-doll again, her fuck toy, hers to take care of. She knows how to make him come. He knows she does. Trusts her with it, even asleep.

“Good boy,” she coos as she pauses to adjust her angle. “Do you want to come, my angel?”

Gale nods, barely. 

She drives back him into him, knows from the way he cries out she got the angle right, and fucks him, ever slow and steady, thumb still massaging the same tender spot on his cock while she massages the tender spot inside him with hers, until Gale’s limp body goes suddenly taut as a guitar string, and he comes with basically no noise at all, still fucking lost in it, drowning in it, half asleep. 

Clove slips out of him in silence, takes off the harness and lays down next to him, tugs on Gale until he rolls towards her. “Just kiss me,” she whispers. 

This much, he can manage. Clove can do the rest. Her fingers know their job this time, and Gale gives a few tired whimpers against her lips, and that’s all it takes. 

Then, they just hold each other. Wordless. Exhausted. Together.

“Are you asleep?” Clove whispers finally. 

“Yes.” 

“You know, if you were, say, asleep on some train tracks, I’d–”

“Jump in front of a train for me, yes yes, I’m aware, thank you. I love you too.” 

Clove cracks an eye. Gale does too, and then they both burst into giggles.

Chapter Text

Maybe it's an awakening.

The woman in the mirror eyes her with a hint of distrust, and no small amount of awe.

Clove no longer, or maybe more Clove than she's ever been. Reincarnated, or re-imagined, or perhaps simply freed. A genie come out of the lamp, finally in true form, already a granter of wishes. Someone new, but she was there all along, wasn't she?

Awakening or not, it was Gale's idea. Drunk on the floor of his study, walls half-painted, surrounded by brushes and rollers and trays, staring at the ceiling, he whispered his wish: drop the armor she's been wearing for over a decade and pick up something else, just to try it on, just to see, just for a minute or two. He wanted her to be brave, like he was when he decided to finally paint his office the foresty green he'd always daydreamed about. He wanted her to explore who she could be outside the mold she created for herself back when life offered her precious little of value to shape herself around, back when she needed armor, back when a hoodie and jeans were all she had. Gale punctuated his wish by drunkenly and impulsively painting a stripe of green down the front of her hoodie, and that, as it turned out, was all it took for the genie to come out.

A lot of paint. Two bottles of wine. A stomach-cramping laugh on the floor. A ruined hoodie. An equally selfish and unselfish wish, so gently and ungently made. Gale, her awakening.

Clove is in new clothes. It's her birthday, after all. This ensemble is her gift to herself. It took four months to follow her gut to this very specific conclusion. No hoodie, no jeans. The only remnants of her usual look are the boots, the messy hair, and the absence of makeup. The woman in the mirror smiles, because she may have taken her time, but she got it right.

A silver high-cut tank top. The one singular non-black item, and partially obscured, but attention grabbing nonetheless, simple, doing exactly what she wants it to. Cargo pants, much looser than her jeans, more comfortable, more pockets. A plain choker, eye-catching only if you know Clove well enough to be jarred by the sight of her in any jewelry besides her piercings. Then, the real gift, an indulgence she wouldn't have dreamed of a decade ago: the leather. Two pieces. A chest harness, and a mid-length jacket. The harness takes clear inspiration from the other harness she dons regularly, and for all the risk it seems to represent as a fashion choice, it gives her nothing but confidence, just as her other one does. The jacket, conversely, had no such inspiration. The jacket was just a sizeable investment in the idea of a Clove who wears things that feel like her, and a daring one at that, but it paid off. The patience, the money, the bravery. All of it.

The woman in the mirror is Clove. From the familiarly booted toe to the evergreen hair, and every novel bit in between. A woman with the independence and security of living a life she built on purpose, and finding a love that tilts her only ever further towards herself. Brick by brick, day by day. Out of the lamp, into the free air, with the power to grant wishes.

Gale is waiting for her.

Clove imagines his impatience with fondness. He was at her bar less than two hours ago. She worked half of her usual shift, to celebrate with her regulars and spend time with Karlach, and Gale sat at her bar like he so often does, and he was very happy to be there. He had no intention of leaving Clove's side tonight, not for a second, and it stung to send him away an hour before her shift ended, but Clove had to stick to her plan, or she was worried she wouldn't see it through. Gale left with a forlorn glance back at her like a kicked puppy, and she rolled his eyes at his dramatics, then pulled out her phone and texted him her instructions the moment he was out the door, standing stone-faced right in front of all her customers, because she did actually feel a little bad about it.

I love having you at my bar, baby, but I need you to do something for me. When you get home, go straight to bed and work yourself open, real slow and easy, just enough to get the plug in. Don't rush. You have plenty of time, and I want you comfortable. No coming. You can text me some progress updates to peek at while I work, if you're feeling generous. Once you're full and ready, Uber to a bar, anywhere that's not near my work, and text me where you end up. Have a couple drinks. I'll meet you there after I get off. I love you.

Gale reacted to the message with a heart, and the simple, wordless reply made Clove burn all over. The equally wordless progress updates only made her burn hotter. Clove was blessedly tipsy and giddy as hell by the time she left work, hardly anxious at all, just ready to go be with her lover on her birthday. Getting dressed was a breeze, in the end. Just a pit stop on the way to her goal.

The woman in the mirror nods to herself one more time before she leaves.

To his credit, Gale's posture at the bar doesn't suggest anything about what might be beneath his clothes. Clove knows for a fact that he followed her instructions to the letter, and yet he still has the nerve to appear not only physically relaxed, but fucking elegant. Silky lilac button-up, sleeves neatly rolled to his elbows, the simple black dress pants he wears to work. Hair half up, single earring glinting in the low light of the bar, glass of wine in his hand. Prim and proper. Gorgeous. Nobody would guess in a million years what's under his clothes, the invisible claim she has on him, the side of him she gets all to herself. Clove is hypnotized by the potency of him from clear across the room, only vaguely aware that she is turning heads at this bar as she approaches him–nearly every head but Gale's, naturally. The clothes aren't forgotten, any means; the world's perception of them has just never mattered less. Clove has eyes and attention only for one. Disbelief clouds her vision as she stares at him. He hasn't even seen her yet. He's about to. It's all because of him.

"Hey, baby."

Surely, to everyone else, it sounds easy and confident. To her own ears, it sounds timid and shy. Clove wonders what Gale hears in it, he who knows her like no one else, keeper of the only opinion in this bar she cares about.

Gale twists to greet her, mouth poised, then stops short of forming a single word. His eyes rake over her entire body at least six times in slow motion before he remembers to shut his mouth. He sets his wine glass down like he's worried it'll shatter from the impact. He licks his lips. The buzz of the bar grows muted and distant.

"Are you real?" Gale asks finally.

Clove tilts her head. "Do you want me to be?"

Gale stands, and takes a step towards her, Clove's whole world on a pinhead. A tentative hand reaches straight for the heart of it all, the piece of this puzzle he knows is especially for him, tracing the leather where it crosses her collar bone. His eyes widen, and his touch grows more reverent. "It's not my birthday," he says in a low voice.

"No, I just know what I want."

The distance between them shrinks once more. Gale meets her eye finally as he says, too quiet for anyone else to hear, so close she can feel his breath on her lips, "Make this whole bar know who I belong to. Please."

That is a wish Clove can grant, here. She wouldn't act like this at her own bar–but this? This is no man's land. This is a bar full of strangers, and they can all survive the one-time show of Clove pushing Gale back against the bar top, leaving no room for doubt or decorum, her lips slanting over his, sneaking one lightning-quick grope to let him know she hasn't forgotten what's hiding there. Gale asked her for this. It was an unavoidable collision. The strangers are just collateral damage.

Gale has two fingers hooked under her harness to keep her close, his erection grazing occasionally against her hip, his wine-sweet tongue moving hungrily against hers, and Clove is… keeping up. Claiming and being claimed. Wish fulfillment. Clove wonders if he'll ever let her stop kissing him, if any of the power she feigns having in their sex life will ever hold a candle to the very real power Gale holds over her always. He got her in these clothes, after all. Perhaps he is the wish-maker and the genie both, and Clove is but his wish. Perhaps the same could be said in reverse, depending on the day.

Clove parts from him to catch her breath. Gale sits back down on his stool with a little huff, and Clove settles in next to him, their knees knocking as they swivel towards each other so they can remain face to face, Gale still holding her by the harness, Clove gripping his thigh just to keep herself upright.

"Clove, you should be illegal," Gale breathes, swaying a bit himself.

Clove only hums, eyes down, distracted by the way he's rubbing the leather between his fingers, as if committing the sensation to memory.

"How do you feel?"

"Like a whole new person, and… very me," Clove says quietly, allowing her eyes to wander hesitantly back up to his face.

Gale meets her gaze immediately, warm and beaming. "You knew what you wanted."

"I only did it because you asked me to."

"I know. I'm the luckiest bastard on the planet for many reasons, but I'm well aware that's one of them."

Clove trails the back of one finger down his jawline. "Gale, if I gave you three more wishes, what would you wish for?"

"Another kiss."

Clove pulls a face. "You only get the three."

"A kiss," he repeats more firmly.

"Are you serious?"

Gale raises a brow at her, unmoved. Clove is still debating whether to grant him his wish or punish him for his insolence when the bartender interrupts them. Gale orders himself another glass of wine; Clove orders a gin and tonic. They turn towards one another again. Clove searches his eyes as they clink glasses. There's mischief, yes, and plenty of desire, but buried far beneath it all, there is something else–more slippery, harder to pin down, but there. Satisfaction? Excitement? Disbelief?

Is he smug?

"Fine," she says dismissively. "Next wish."

Gale is thrown off for only a few seconds. "Ah. I did not specify a timeline. Very well. My second wish is for you to kiss me right this instant."

"Gale! You're–"

"Ah, ah, ah! I said now! If you're going to grant it, it has–"

Clove cuts him off, hard, closed-mouth and too brief for either of their liking. Gale's hand has already returned to the harness to keep her close by the time their lips part.

"You're such a brat," she mutters. "What's your third, then? A hug?"

Gale hesitates. "I want to make my third wish at home."

Clove rolls her eyes. "A fuck, then."

"I'd love it if you fucked me, sweetheart, but I don't think I need to use a wish on that."

"Then why the hell did–"

"Because the third wish is the only one that matters. Besides, shouldn't you be the one making wishes tonight, not granting them?"

"I can do whatever I want."

Gale guides her hand to his hip, adjusting her fingers until they're splayed wide and pointed downwards. He shifts his weight on the stool conspicuously, moving her hand with him. "You certainly can," he murmurs. "Anything at all, and you want to be my genie."

"Yeah," Clove says, dropping her hand a little lower still, digging the tips of her fingers in where they just barely reach the flesh of his ass, smiling when he shivers. "A lot of people have tried to get me to wear different clothes before, you know. Basically every ex I've ever had. Friends. Regulars."

Gale relinquishes his hold on her harness so he can wind the hand around her back instead, hidden under her jacket, free to shove her tank top up shamelessly and lay his palm flat on her skin, right over her spine. His gaze burns as it lands on her lips. "And did you ever?"

"No. Always just felt like people were being condescending, or… I don't know, passive aggressive–like they really hated my hoodies and just weren't brave enough to say it to my face. But when you asked, I barely had to think about it. I just wanted to. I wanted to see your face when your eyes landed on the harness for the first time. I wanted to try something new with you, just to see if you'd like it. And, well, I like it too, turns out, and I'm… really fucking grateful, to be able to do shit like this with you. You make it really easy."

Gale sighs, droops forward until his head lands on her shoulder, and then for a long moment he is silent but for the shaky breaths fanning hot across her neck. The hand on her back eventually tugs her tank top back down and instead reaches up to trace the leather over her shoulder blade. His voice is so soft when he speaks again that Clove has to strain to hear him.

"The first time I ever laid eyes on you, I remember thinking no one could make a plain hoodie look better than you did. I remember how soft it made you, the first time I got to hold you in it, outside the bar, when you kissed me. I remember being in your bedroom, and you offered to take it off, and I barely wanted you to, because I would have much rather just crawled inside of it with you. You were… so you, from your clothes to your hair to the way you made a drink, and every part of you called to me in a way I'd never been called to before."

Clove rests her head on top of his, closes her eyes, listens so intently she can't hear the bar at all anymore, only Gale–his breathing still uneven, his voice sure and calm, like the journey scares him a little bit, but he knows exactly where he's going.

"I know you much better now, though," he continues softly. "It's been growing on my mind lately, how unexpected and unlikely you were, to cross my path like that, and how utterly unexpected you have been every step of the way since. The way you grow so decisively, always when I least expect it, and how the person you are now calls to me in all sorts of new ways, and I… want you in new ways as a consequence. I was thinking about it, that night on the floor, with the paint. I wanted to ask you something, but I couldn't find the courage, so I asked you about your wardrobe instead, because it was as close as I could get."

Gale lifts his head. Clove's eyes blink open reluctantly, and it's like being face to face with the sun, blazing with warmth, a whole inferno of it, and he's not even making eye contact.

"What did you want to ask?" Clove whispers.

Gale traces her choker with one finger, gaze steadily fixed on it. "I wanted to know if you would wear a ring."

Clove opens her mouth, entirely unsure as to what may be about to come out of it, but Gale lifts a finger to her lips, and finally meets her eye.

"I bought you one. I wasn't looking for it. It was an impulse purchase, and I immediately proceeded to have a crisis about it. I had–and still have–no idea about your thoughts on getting married. I'm rather ashamed to admit I always assumed–perhaps unfairly–that you would not be open to the notion, so I childishly avoided the topic to spare my own feelings. I certainly had no idea if you would ever be willing to wear a ring. I just knew I very much wanted to marry you one day, if you'd allow me to, and then I happened upon this ring, and I just… felt inexplicably like it was the only reminder of myself it would ever feel right to leave on you. It felt so right, in the moment, but after the fact, I felt terribly guilty–that I had presumed to know how you feel about marriage for so long without asking you, and then presumed to buy you a ring anyway. I couldn't bring myself to ask you about it directly that night, but in hindsight, I think perhaps I asked you the perfect substitute. Because you showed up here tonight with… the boldest possible answer, stepped into the unknown just because I asked, grew as decisively as you always do, wove me into the choices you made, and… God, you look so fucking incredible, Clove, and I'm so proud of you, and the ring would complement your outfit so perfectly that I…"

"That you're proposing to me?"

"No, not exactly," he hedges, finally blushing. "I am… asking you to try on the concept of it."

"By trying on the ring?"

"Yes."

"And then, if you test the waters and determine that I'm okay with the whole marriage thing, you're going to take the ring away from me, so you can use it in some absolutely insane, over-the-top proposal."

"Most likely, yes."

Clove hesitates. "And if I'm not okay with the whole marriage thing?"

Gale shrugs in a way that is very nearly convincing. "That would be alright. You could still keep the ring, if you wanted. I think it would suit you on any finger."

"Gale, if any part of this is in deal breaker territory, I really want to know."

"It's not. I've given this a great deal of thought, and I can promise you it's not. It is important to me, I will admit, but nothing I would dream of giving you up over. Disappointment is survivable."

Clove falls silent, studying his face, thinking hard. Thirty eight years of bias, negative association, hating weddings, and a bone-deep belief that it would never matter. It's surprisingly easy to sort through now, with Gale waiting on her answer. "I'm not going to have a wedding, lover," she says finally, quietly. "The parties, the fanfare, the… familial expectations–I won't touch it."

Gale tilts his head, eyes skimming back down over her outfit once more. "What if it was just us? Would you dress up for me again?"

"Maybe," Clove says with a coy smile. "Only if you wear the toy for me again."

"Anything for you," Gale returns dryly.

Clove laughs, and pulls him into a hug. "Jesus, Gale. I just wanted to make you really horny in a bar for fun, and you fucking proposed to me."

"That was not a proposal. And if it was, you didn't exactly provide a clear answer."

"Oh, you want an answer to your not-proposal."

"I'd go so far as to say I've earned one."

"Baby, I'm your fucking genie," Clove whispers, lips inches from his ear. "I'll do anything you want."

Gale lifts his head and meets her gaze, eyes huge. "You mean it?"

Clove nods. "Well, I mean, not anything. No weddings. No white. No… bullshit. But yeah. The rest is alright. With you, it's alright."

The recklessness with which Gale throws himself at her for a kiss suggests the proposal was much more real to him than he insisted on, but Clove's not going to mention it. Whatever elaborate fifteen-step plan Gale is concocting to achieve the lofty goal of getting Clove to agree to something she's already agreed to is fine by her. For tonight, she gets to be rewarded with kisses, and enjoy his company. It's her birthday, after all, and this is all she wanted: to share a couple drinks with him, watch him squirm on his stool and blush every time she touches him, flirt only gently, and sit with the way loving him reinvents her, over and over and over, no stone unturned, no opinion left unexamined. Clove always thought of herself as stuck in her ways, but she's starting to understand it's all down to who asks her to try something new.

Gale looks a little less elegant than he did when Clove walked into this bar. Hair mussed from the kissing, neck flushed, a gaze that is drawn inexorably back to the leather on her chest no matter how many times he dutifully tears it away. Clove considers asking him to follow her into the bathroom, because he would say yes, and he deserves a reward for sitting so pretty and patient next to her all that time. But he also deserves better than a bathroom. Tonight was a long time in the making, for both of them. At the very least, Clove needs to fuck him properly.

Across the back seat of the Uber, Gale extends a hand to her, and even in the dark Clove can see it's shaking like a leaf. She unbuckles and re-buckles herself into the middle seat, pulling him tight against her side, pressing her nose to his temple.

"You alright?" she murmurs.

"Just excited, I think," he whispers.

"For what?"

"All of it."

"Are you tipsy?"

"Yes."

"Mm. You've been so patient, lover."

"Clove."

There's no way the driver can hear her, not when she's talking this low, so soft the hum of the engine drowns her out. Only Gale risks giving them away, so Clove ignores his warning, and drops her voice even further as she wiggles a hand under his ass and gets the best handful she can manage. "I made you wait so long, and you were so fucking good for me."

It stops his shaking. Gale melts into her, muscles slack, head turned so he can bury it in her neck, God knows what kind of noises locked inside his chest where Clove can't hear them. Oh well. She'll hear him soon enough.

Too soon, perhaps. Gale is tutting before Clove's fingers reach the laces of her boots. "Not yet!" he scolds, swatting her hand away as he toes off his own shoes. "Stay put, exactly as you are. I'll be right back."

Clove suppresses a laugh in favor of rolling her eyes, and the swallowed energy sinks like a stone as she remembers what Gale is doing, then takes the shape of an anxious pit in her stomach when he reappears with a little box in his hand.

"You want to do this in the entryway?" she asks, biting her nails.

"I want you to be in the full outfit you chose," Gale replies softly as he tugs her hand away from her mouth. "That's my third wish. To see it all together."

"But god forbid a single speck of dirt gets tracked through the house, so you're gonna make me stand next to the shoe rack, with no mirror, so you'll be able to see it all put together, but I won't."

Gale pulls his lower lip between his teeth to conceal his smile. "I'll take a picture for you," he murmurs, smoothing his hand across her harness one more time. "Close your eyes."

"Hey!"

"Just for a moment," he insists through a giggle. "I want you to see it on your finger. If the size is too atrociously wrong, we may have to do this another time. Just let me put it on you. Let me see."

Clove only realizes her eyes are quickly filling with tears when Gale's hand flies to her cheek.

"What's wrong? I'm sorry, love. I can just show it to you, or… or we don't have to do this at all."

"No, we're doing this," Clove says stubbornly, slamming her eyes shut, trying not to completely lose it as Gale wipes away the tear that's forced out.

"You're sure?"

"Yes. Go."

Another minute passes in silence, anticipation hanging thick in the air, and then Gale's lips press to hers briefly. The tension eases. They both sigh.

"Clove," Gale whispers as he parts from her, and picks up her left hand.

"Yeah?"

A box creaks open, and Gale's warm fingers quickly slide something cold over her knuckle. It's dead silent for another few seconds.

"Happy birthday, sweetheart," he says softly, and Clove needs no further invitation to open her eyes.

The ring is a large, solitaire, rectangular stone set on a matte gold band. At a distance, the stone appears black. Clove would have guessed onyx, but upon closer inspection, it's not black at all. Very dark, certainly, but shot through with dozens of little rays of a vibrant blue-green. The band, too, is more complex than she could make out at a distance–ornately carved nearly all the way around with what appear to be the ripples of running water.

By the time Clove remembers she should be having a reaction that is audible, all she can manage through the overwhelm is one quiet croak. "The river."

"The river," Gale confirms, pleased. "The stone is a sapphire."

"I didn't know they could look like that."

"Me neither."

Clove looks up at him finally, his tentative expression, the little dent of worry between his brows, and cocks her head playfully. "Well, how's the completed look?"

"Clove, if you don't tell me what you think right this second–"

"I can't even see what I look like! I'm standing by the fucking shoe rack! It smells like socks! Aren't you supposed to be a romantic?"

Gale's huff is the most dramatic Clove's ever gotten out of him, and her all time favorite. He drags her through the house by her harness, and Clove is laughing so hard she nearly falls up the stairs. As soon as they're in front of the floor-length mirror in their bedroom, breathless and giggling, Clove is done being maneuvered. She grabs Gale by the shoulders, yanks him in front of her, tugs until his back is flush to her front, and kisses the tip of his ear in greeting. She rests her left hand on his chest, and watches him stare at it in the mirror.

"I thought you wanted to see it all together," he manages, still breathing hard.

"I did. You and me and the ring."

"Clove."

"Where did you find it?"

"I was at a jeweler's to get my watch repaired."

"Mm. And you didn't even know my size."

"But it fits. Clove, tell me it's alright," he pleads, through a clearly tightening throat. "Tell me you'll wear it."

"Oh, lover," Clove mutters darkly, staring at the ring with him now. "You're never getting it back."

Gale sighs, and reaches up to lay his hand over hers, tracing the stone with one trembling finger. "For many years, before I met you, I believed–or rather, was made to believe that marriage was permanently beyond my reach. And naturally, since I couldn't have it, I wanted all of it. I wanted the whole nine yards, every bit of fanfare you can imagine. I made it my mission to collect as many things to resent not having as I could find. And then… and then the sun was coming up, and I was about to have to leave you, and I was thinking about how if I had married you in a courthouse that same morning, after one night, with you in your hoodie and me in my wrinkly day old clothes, both hungover, I would have missed nothing of what I thought I wanted. None of it mattered. Not really."

He has to pause to clear his throat here, and he squeezes her hand once, making watery eye contact with her in the mirror.

"Which is all to say, you can keep it. I can propose without it, or I don't have to propose at all, if you don't want. I don't mind how we do it. Just so long as you're not going anywhere."

For the first time tonight, Clove has to hide from him to cry. She buries her face in his shoulder, and Gale squirms and twists his way around in her arms until he can hug her. After a few minutes in relative silence, he slips her jacket off her shoulders and tosses it gently onto the bed, Clove still pillowed on his shoulder.

"The silver was an excellent choice," he murmurs, adjusting the straps of her tank top and smoothing his hands down over her shoulders before enveloping her in a hug again.

"I know you've been staring at my chest all night, but I'm kind of surprised you noticed the shirt."

"I've noticed plenty."

Clove turns her face towards his neck, letting her lips linger at the base of it. "Like what?"

"You're not wearing a bra, for one thing."

"Wow. You did notice, and you still didn't even try to feel me up at the bar."

"Are you feeling unwanted, my love?"

Clove laughs, kisses his neck, and lifts her head. "No, but I've been trying very hard to make you horny, and you just keep making me cry."

"Mm. It's surprisingly easy to make you cry while compromised the way that I am."

Clove spins him so fast he yelps. Heart thudding wildly beneath her left hand, warm body crushed to her chest again, eyes wide, he is her very favorite type of prey as she growls at him.

"It's not easy; you're just insane. And now you're going to live your whole life having proposed to your wife with a toy up your ass."

Gale flushes. "It wasn't a proposal."

"Baby, I'll tell you what," Clove says, copping an indulgently slow feel like she's wanted to all night, making him gasp. "Make it even dirtier with me. Count tonight as the proposal, marry me in a courthouse tomorrow morning, and our engagement can just be one drunk fuck. Two, if you're lucky."

"Three, or no deal," Gale mutters with a barely perceptible smirk, sliding her hand further up his chest, splaying her fingers across the base of his throat, like he's more curious how they'll look resting there than anything.

"When would I fit the third in?" Clove asks, a little distracted, experimenting with the way pressing on the toy makes his back arch, and making his back arch gives definition to the way his cock is beginning to strain against his pants. "After you're asleep?"

Gale watches himself grow pink in the mirror as he nods, watches her fingers flex around his throat at the exact same moment her palm connects with his ass, then they both watch his whole body snap taut like a piano wire. "Fuck," he breathes. "I like this."

"God, yeah, look at how fucking hot you are," Clove pants, reaching around to undo his pants with one hand. "How's the toy, baby?"

Gale shakes his head, and his eyes slip closed. "It's not–"

"Keep watching, my angel," she chides lightly. "What's wrong with the toy?"

Gale drags his eyes open, helps her shimmy his pants and underwear down, kicks them off his feet, and stares wide-eyed at himself, like he's watching a movie, powerless to stop it as he thrusts his ass back into her hand. "Fuck," he whimpers. "I want you."

Clove hums as she kneads the flesh of his ass mindlessly, evaluating them in the mirror, adjusting them forty five degrees to the left, then to the right, before settling to the left. Gale can see more of her this way, and she can see the curve of his ass, and they can both still see the ring currently resting in the hollow of his throat. She's getting the staging right, taking her time, ignoring the pleas of her greedy little whore, who is reaching behind himself to grab fistfuls of her harness now, nipping at her neck, demanding her attention with increasing desperation, and only barely watching the show she's trying to get right.

Clove stills all his writhing with one iron grip on his hip and the arm she still has wrapped around his chest. "Gale, look at you."

She can visualize the rate at which his eyes come into focus. The deceleration of his breathing. The pink blooming under the hair across his chest. The perfect little O of his mouth, because Gale looks fucking perfect, and he knows. Oh, he knows.

"Yeah, look at you, my slut, my angel," she coos. "Knows exactly how pretty he is, knows he can get whatever the fuck he wants, and begs anyway, because being a whore turns him on."

Gale could have had any number of reactions Clove would have adored, but he just fucking smiles, like a dope, and a genius, and the weirdest person she's ever met, and Clove has no choice but to make his ass glow pink for it, but she also has to whisper a few more tender words as he comes down from the stinging, because fucking Christ.

The plug comes out in the space of one exhale, and Gale stands trembling with relief and anticipation until she returns from discarding it and folds him back into her arms. Clove fingers him for a little while then, index and middle, lazy and aimless, just so they can watch it together in the mirror–her hand squeezed into the limited space between their bodies, the ring still resting at the base of his throat, Gale's two fingers hooked under her harness, his hips rocking gently. Occasionally, their wandering eyes meet, and every time they do, Gale gives her a sweet little smile, and a sweeter little moan.

"You feel so good," he pants, turning to nuzzle his nose into her cheek. "Oh, sweetheart, you feel, you look so–oh!"

Gale cries out as Clove twists her fingers for one stroke, then on the next, he thrusts his ass back onto her fingers hard, his grip on the harness the only thing preventing her from being knocked back a step by the force of it.

"Fuck," Clove growls, arm tightening around his chest, fingers locking around his throat, crowding as close as she can. "You wanna use me, baby? Is that what you're trying to do?"

Gale shakes his head, but she can tell in the mirror that he's looking straight at her harness as his fingers run along it. "I want you to fuck me," he whispers.

Clove twists her fingers again. Gale braces himself against her harness for the next stroke, waiting for his chance, but there is none. Her fingers are gone. Gale tugs harshly on her, and whines. Clove reaches up and gently untangles his fingers from the harness, then leans in close to his ear.

"Take your shirt off, then go stand facing the wall by the mirror. I want your cheek pressed to the fucking paint, lover. Then be quiet, and wait."

Gale obeys silently, and the feeling that washes over Clove as she watches him is indescribable. A heady mix of lust and power and love and alcohol that has her floating on a fucking cloud as she carries on with her half-formed and potentially far fetched plan.

Clove washes her hands. She takes her boots off, finally, and carries them all the way back down to the shoe rack. She hangs up her jacket. The first needy little whine escapes Gale as she strips from the waist down, and Clove smiles. She hums to him as she fishes an assortment of supplies out of their nightstand and arranges them on the bed, because even from across the room she can tell he's shaking. Gale whines once more as she finally approaches him. She runs a soothing hand down his spine.

"So well behaved for me," she sighs, then taps twice on his ass. "Show it off for me a little, lover."

This is enough to make him go fully scarlet. He huffs self consciously as he shuffles his feet backwards, jutting his ass out for her by only a few inches.

"Oh, good fucking boy. Thank you. God, you're perfect. I've wanted you so bad all night, baby," she sighs as she clicks on the vibrator in her hand. Gale tenses. "I just want to enjoy you for a while, okay?"

Gale groans, long and low, almost a sound of pain. Clove moans luxuriously in reply as she slips the vibrator between her folds, and presses her whole body forward so he can feel it too, buzzing right against the meat of his ass. She slips just one finger back into him, drops her head forward onto his shoulder, and searches for nothing but her own pleasure. It comes easy. Masturbating has never felt this good. Playing with his ass with one curious finger like his hole is nothing but her fidget toy, ignoring his endless protests, sinking into his desperation like a bath, exaggerating every one of her moans to make sure he knows just how much she's enjoying him like this.

He must know. Her pleasure drowns out even his agony, eventually. Little by little, Gale lets this happen, begins to encourage it–makes noises that don't sound like outrage, stops wiggling his hips trying to make the one sorry finger feel satisfying, stops fighting and gives in to her fully. The heat that's been pooling in Clove's abdomen all night contracts, intensifies, drops lower, all astoundingly quickly. Even by the too-soon end, Gale has her by the harness again, holding her to him as fiercely as he can, his own pleasure forgotten, and he's begging for her to come, begging to be told he's a good fuck toy, begging to be used.

So easy to win over tonight, her Gale. So shaky he needs to be carried to bed. So sweet that a few tears slip down his cheeks as she showers him with praise. So fucking perfect, that as she reaches for her other harness, he stops her.

"One more, first," he croaks. "Up here."

Clove cradles his cheek. "Baby, I'd give you anything in the fucking world right now."

Gale tugs at her. "I know. Give me this."

Clove has to obey before she starts crying again. Gale's fourth wish–or is it his fifth, his twentieth, his thousandth–is to eat her out from beneath her, his right hand clinging to her left, pointer finger tracing her ring endlessly. She was trying to make him take, somehow, urging him towards the instinct the leather on her chest has seemed to bring to the surface in him tonight, but he's just giving.

Or maybe taking and giving are one and the same, made indistinguishable by the increasingly blurry lines of desire. Gale both gives and takes her orgasm, kisses every knuckle as she comes down but the one with the ring on it twice, and then, as Clove leans her heavy head against the headboard, panting, recovering, he takes and gives something entirely unexpected.

Gale buckles her into her other harness. He's never done it for her before. It's a little awkward, a little fumbled, but utterly sincere, and exceptionally gentle, and it renders Clove speechless the whole way through. Gale even slathers her cock with lube, then kisses her still open mouth before nudging her down the bed and between his legs.

"I keep breaking you tonight," he notes with a smile.

Clove lines herself up with him, presses lightly, and pauses. "I thought I was going to break you."

Gale opens his mouth to reply, but defers it to a moan as she presses inside him. His hands immediately reach for her, tempting her down within reach so he can grab the harness again. Clove smiles. Of course.

She rolls her hips once, slow and easy.

"You did break me," Gale gasps finally. "You broke me with this fucking harness, and then I told you all my secrets."

"I'm surprised you managed to keep a secret at all."

Gale yanks sharply, and Clove half falls on him. "Fuck me," he says, very nearly a snap.

Clove lifts herself onto her elbows, blinking down at him, a little dazed. Maybe he really did break her. Tripped a circuit somewhere. "What are you going to do if I keep teasing you, lover? Use that harness to roll me over and do it yourself? Ride me? Use me?"

"No. I can have anything I want, so I'm going to use you from right here."

The sound of her own labored breathing is suddenly all Clove can hear. "Oh?"

Gale keeps one hand on the harness to pull her down for a kiss, and uses his other to shove her tank top up until one of her breasts falls free so he can palm it roughly. "Oh, don't act coy. You made it easy on purpose, my love. The harness, the choker, no bra, giving me so many wishes I can waste them on kisses and still get everything I want. You'll do whatever I want, so fuck me, Clove. Hard. I want everything you have. Now."

On second thought, maybe Clove just didn't know what taking meant. Didn't know what it looked like to cash every check at once, send the whole whitewater flood in reverse, do it with perfect confidence, because throwing your weight around to this extent requires it. This is Gale giving her a gift on her birthday that she would never have thought to ask for, letting her be wanted in a new way, taken in a new way, understood in a new way.

Clove is frozen for only a second or two, and then Gale pulls her close enough to sink his teeth into her bottom lip, and Clove begins to move with a low groan, muscles unwilling from a long muscle memory of hating taking orders, but not incapable.

"More," he rasps against her mouth immediately, rolling her nipple between two fingers, planting his feet on the bed. When she doesn't speed up on the very next thrust, Gale growls at her. "Now. I want you. I've wanted you all night. That harness–fuck!"

Clove slams into him, cries out with him, head dropped to the mattress and hands scrambling to find a resting spot in his hair, something to hold on to, something to keep her tethered. "Gale," she chokes. "Gale, I'm–"

"Again," Gale demands, dipping his head to her shoulder, abandoning her breast, letting it dangle against his chest so he can reach around and scrape his nails down her back instead. "More. You're mine. Walked into that bar, looking like that, just–ah!–just for me, just to make me want you. God. Fuck. I always want you. I want all of you. Give me fucking everything, Clove. All of you. Forever."

Gale sinks his teeth into her shoulder, and Clove sobs. The bed shakes with every violent roll of her hips, and Gale's legs are already trembling, she can feel it, all his boundless energy, all his consuming desire. He's consuming her. He's not going to stop. Clove might come from it. Oh, God. She's going to come from it.

"Oh, fuck," she grunts, pulling mercilessly at his scalp, driving into him with all the dwindling force she can muster, ripping apart at the seams. "Gale, I'm, please, take, take me."

The harness burns, her legs burn, her lungs burn, the indents of Gale's teeth in her shoulder burn, the nail marks on her back burn, the ring on her finger burns. Gale lifts his head to her ear, tantalizingly slow, and his rough voice is not remotely cooling.

"Everything you have, beautiful girl. Don't stop now. Look at you. Fuck, you're perfect. Gasping for air, sweating, shaking. Keep going. Fuck me until we both come. You can do it. I need you. God, I need you."

Clove's whole body shudders hard, and she loses her rhythm momentarily, and swears. Gale finally abandons her harness. He reaches for a fistful of her hair instead, drags her head up, and meets her gaze for one fiery second.

"You. All of you. My only wish."

Clove nods, trying to blink the tears of her eyes. "You have me."

Gale drags her into a kiss, starts rolling his hips into hers, wraps a hand around his cock, and takes all he can get in the brief and blinding thirty seconds before Clove bottoms out for a moment too long, clit grinding into the strap, and groans so loud into his mouth as she comes it almost sounds like a scream. Gale follows her immediately, and his sounds more like a sigh. His own cum on his chin, Clove utterly boneless on top of him. Content. Satisfied. All his wishes granted.

Clove is already half asleep as Gale strips her of all her leather and cleans her up. As he lays down again, she's dimly aware of him picking up her left hand. She cracks an eye.

"Tomorrow?" she croaks.

"You're one for three, and nearly asleep already, my dearest love."

Clove grunts noncommittally. "When, then?"

"Whenever we're ready," he whispers.

Chapter Text

The springs in the mattress above her groan as Gale shifts restlessly on top of them.

Clove lets out a slow, quiet breath, and slips a hand beneath her underwear. A well-timed cough from one of their neighbors conceals the sound of her folds parting. Then, silence. Oh, blessed silence. For three, two, one…

The creak of a mattress to their right. A grunt from their left. Gale huffs.

So worked up, her Gale, and in all the wrong ways.

To be fair, the sleeping accommodations on this train are thoroughly inadequate for Gale Dekarios. Paper-thin walls, paper-thin blinds, paper-thin mattresses. Every creak, every errant cough, every spring in contact with his spine, every bit of light from the window, it all permeates right through Gale's paper-thin skin, settles underneath it and makes him want to claw his way out. He's miserable. He's paranoid about making noise, and the top bunk collapsing beneath him, and every little pop or clang of the train. He misses the nighttime comforts he's come to rely so heavily on–his bed, his pillows, his privacy, not to mention his Clove, who currently cannot hold him or talk to him or hum to him, trapped as she is a few feet below him. This shoddy little room, silent by necessity and never truly silent for a moment, is driving Gale to the very brink of a nervous meltdown.

It's just simply unfortunate, the way Clove's whole body reacted to the sight of him when she got up to use the bathroom. She'd glanced back from the doorway–in which, it ought to also be noted, there is no actual functional door, only a goddamn curtain–and despite everything about the situation telling her she should feel literally anything else, he took her fucking breath away. Bathed in moonlight, body stiff and straight as a rod, fists clenched at his side, glaring daggers at the ceiling, toes curling over and over, chest moving unsteadily in all his agitation; Clove was transfixed.

He looked like a statue, so softly lit and threatening to shatter. He looked like a hard shell with something beautiful caged inside. He looked like he had so many gorgeous noises sitting just under his throat, making the veins in his neck pulse frantically with how badly they needed to escape. He looked plastic-wrapped in his anxiety, unable to move, hardly able to breathe, and Clove could picture in her head all the hundreds of different ways she could set him free.

She's still picturing it. All the possibilities play out behind her eyelids as she tries to sleep, no matter how badly she doesn't want them to, and her body knows no better than to respond. The heat pools between her legs, her core grows heavier, her breath speeds without her say so. She could blame the edible, but really, wanting what she cannot have is something of an old habit when it comes to Gale, and she's long since grown spoiled, because from the very beginning, she has almost invariably been able to have what she wants. What is this set of extremely unappealing circumstances except another challenge for her to rise to? What is all his plastic wrap but a prison he needs to be sprung from? When is Gale more free than when he's coming apart for her?

Someone is snoring now. The warm yellow light of a passing city briefly drowns out the moonlight. Gale has fallen entirely silent above her. Clove circles her clit, kneads lazily at one breast, and wonders exactly how many people would hear it if she moaned. Her heavy-lidded eyes land on the ladder to Gale's bunk, and she wonders next how many people would hear him, if she was fucking him up against it. It is only when the snoring from their neighbor ceases that she realizes just how labored her own breathing has become from all her high wondering.

Clove's phone lights up. Her hand doesn't break stride as she checks it.

Are you alright?

What a text to receive, from the man living so very precariously with only his last nerve between him and a panic attack that would wake the whole car. Clove smiles, and abandons her activities so she can reply to him with both hands.

mhm. are you?

No. Your breathing is very loud.

my breathing is what's bothering you, is it?

Not entirely, but it's very distracting.

maybe you need to be distracted. you're awfully huffy up there.

Gale doesn't respond, so Clove pokes the bottom of his mattress with her big toe.

That is crossing a line.

okay, okay. i'm sorry, baby. i know you're having a bad time. wanna come down here with me?

We wouldn't fit.

sure we would. you could lay on me. i'm comfier than the springs. you'd sleep better.

Gale doesn't reply again. Clove tries a softer approach.

i miss you.

I miss you too. I'm sorry. The thought of climbing down there and all the racket it will cause is distressing to me. I feel so miserably on edge, and we have to do this all over again tomorrow night.

Clove chews her lip, deliberating.

it's the noise that's stressing you out?

Primarily, yes.

okay, i have another idea.

What's that?

try to only listen to me.

I really don't want to add to the racket. You know how dearly I love your voice, but I fear if you talk, I'll only feel worse.

i won't talk.

This stumps him for a minute or two. Clove reaches one hand under her clothes again, swirling her fingers through her hair idly as she waits.

What are you going to do, then?

i'll be quiet. just listen for me.

Alright. I'll try.

The skepticism cascades down from the top bunk in waves. Clove keeps her phone in her left hand as her right moves lower. One of their closest neighbors sneezes, the mattress above her squeaks as Gale jumps, and at the same moment the room is plunged into darkness as something–maybe a tall line of trees–blocks out the moonlight. Clove waits a few seconds for everything to settle, for the right moment, as quiet as this car is capable of getting, the soft rumble of the train her only competition, then sinks two fingers inside herself in the pitch black.

The sound seems, at least to Clove, to be quite loud, and it's a sound Gale has heard many times over, knows by heart, would know anywhere. Her slick parting from itself, her lips parting from each other, her fingers gliding slow and easy, her hitched breathing. It's all familiar to him, and she would bet anything he can hear it.

While the silence lasts, Gale only listens. Perhaps hypnotized. Perhaps horrified. Then, the snoring from earlier resumes, and the text arrives almost immediately.

Now? Really?

as if you've never wanted me under less than ideal circumstances.

Have they ever been less ideal than this?

do you really want me to answer that?

The lack of reply is its own answer.

think of it like a little show i'm putting on for you, lover. a naughty secret you get to share with just me. i bet by the time i come, you won't be hearing all that other noise anymore.

Above her, only a sigh. Resigned. A little anxious. A little relieved, too. The moonlight streams suddenly back in through the blinds. Clove wonders if he can still hear her over the snoring.

This is what you were doing when I first texted you, then?

yeah. i want you no matter where we are.

Even when you cannot have me.

am i not having you right now, baby?

You certainly have my attention.

and that's all you need to give me. i want it to be just us, baby. i want to be all you can think about, even though you can't see me or feel me and you can barely hear me. you can do that, can't you?

Yes.

Clove arches her back enough to make the mattress creak, then heaves a deep sigh. There's movement above her as well, but more muted than hers. Just the shuffling of fabric, skin brushing against skin, a phone landing on the mattress with a dull thud.

that hand wrapped around you, is it me, baby?

Yes. Fuck. You put it there.

That text took noticeably longer to compose. Restricted to one-handed speed, just like her.

good boy.

Clove, there's no door.

mm, better not come while i'm not up there to make sure you stay nice and quiet, then.

And you *will* stay nice and quiet?

yeah. you want me to prove it? you want to be the only one to hear me come?

Yes. I want it all for myself. God, you sounded so wet for me, Clove.

i was. just from wanting you when i couldn't have you.

Ever so softly, Gale gasps.

Clove's breathing only grows louder, devolves to panting, and her hips roll to meet her hand, and she drops the phone on the mattress so she can touch more of herself.

There are other noises, still. Someone is walking to the bathroom. A sniffle travels around the car like a yawn. Squeaky springs with every toss and turn. Within Gale and Clove's room, though, there is only breathing. A startling lack of noise, in the face of the air so electrified it's practically humming all by itself. The silence is erotic, for the simple fact that it makes no sense. Hands in all the most dangerous places. So much their bodies have to tell each other. Clove is so close. Gale is still texting her; she cranes her neck to be able to see her phone screen.

It's very naughty, getting yourself off here. We're basically in public, sweetheart. You sound so good, though. Fuck. I wish I could feel your legs shaking. I wish I could taste you.

I love you. I'm glad you're here with me.

Quietly now, my love. Nobody gets to hear you but me. Come for me.

Within the flimsy walls of the room, even the breathing stops. Clove's orgasm is marked by only the soft rustling of her skin writhing against the sheets, and after a few long moments, the slow, shaky, simultaneous exhale of their shared held breath.

It feels jarring–wrong, even, to remain in silence after that. Clove feels Gale's absence like a weight on her chest. In place of his voice, his warmth, his presence, there is only emptiness, sharp and heavy. She closes her eyes to stem to the tears that are threatening the form, and once again, same but different, she sees him behind her eyelids. Lit up silver, stiff but not quite as straight, toes stuck curled, Adam's apple bobbing, eyes squeezed shut, head of his cock peeking out of his closed fist. Gale, in absence of Clove, unsatisfied, anxious, not allowed to come, touching himself anyway. This distraction was her idea, after all. Clove needs to see it through, all the way until Gale is asleep, tucked to her chest, taken care of and at peace.

thank you for indulging my bad behavior, lover.

It was a welcome distraction, I must admit.

From somewhere to their left, a startling cough fades first to a splutter, and then finally a snore. Gale huffs. A hand hits the mattress above her, like maybe it gave up on its task.

baby, it's just noise. it can't hurt you.

It feels like it can.

come down here with me.

I can't.

can i come up there with you?

The bed will collapse.

no it won't, silly man.

No reply.

Clove takes a deep breath. Above her, a distinct, nervous swallow.

i love you.

The reply is nearly instantaneous, but Clove doesn't see it. She's already out of the bunk, phone abandoned. Her movements are so quick and decisive that the creaking of the mattress could reasonably just be her rolling over. There is no time to stop and ogle him, not now. She climbs halfway up the ladder to Gale's bunk, grabs him by the calves, and pulls in one smooth motion until he is within reach for her to maneuver his whole body. She flips him sideways, then keeps one protective hand at the base of his skull as she guides his head back and down to rest against the wall opposite her. He's laying as flat as he can be while horizontal on the bed, propped up a little, knees bracketing her rib cage, feet hooked on the ladder like he's worried she's going to drag him straight out of the bed.

Clove has him arranged how she wants him in only a few seconds, and the groaning mattress was the worst of the clamor. Certainly nothing louder than the ruckus their neighbors have been making in their goddamn sleep all night. Gale's eyes are wide as anything, though, and his chest is heaving, and even as gingerly as Clove removes her hand from behind his head, it still manages to produce a little thud when it lands against the wall that makes him wince. He would surely complain, if he could talk. But he can't.

Clove smiles serenely as she lets him settle. She gives him ample time to adjust his limbs and recover from the shock before she climbs one more step up the ladder, and leans forward far enough to reach his lips. Gale yields to her easily, and she suddenly can't help but fancy privately that if Gale moaned against her lips, the vibrations would travel through his skull, pass into the paper-thin wall, and be delivered directly to their neighbors pillows, much crisper than any creak or snore. Gale won't moan, though. She can feel all the tension he's holding, his brittle shell right under her fingers, and she knows he won't make a sound. Her sad, uncomfortable, tightly-wound lover.

Clove won't make a sound either. If this is how Gale needs it to be, she'll give him silence. It surprises her a little actually, just how soundless the glide of their lips can be, when they both want it to be. It's easy to get lost in kissing when that's all there is to have, no distracting moans or pleading whimpers, no pause for conversation, no exaggerated movements. And Gale is allowing it. Erection poking at her stomach, shaking hands gripping her sides, helping to keep her steady, in harmony with her, open to this–so far.

Clove stuck to his rules, after all. He's still in his bunk, and she's not in it with him. Not fully.

The loudest their lips ever get is the gentle smack when they finally part. Gale's eyes are wide and unblinking, and they grow wider as Clove holds a finger to his lips. He just nods, as if asking him to be quiet is a request she would feel the need to make right now.

Clove's eyes flicker between her finger and his face a few times, hinting, waiting for her very smart professor to figure it out. He's quick, as always. His tongue darts out, licks once, and as it retracts back into his mouth, Clove's finger follows it. His breathing hitches, then evens out as he sucks her finger a little deeper. His eyes flicker briefly to the ring sitting just a few inches from his lips, then slip closed. Clove wants to tell him how good he is more than anything in the world.

Clove offers him one more finger to keep his mouth plenty busy as she climbs two steps down the ladder, tugs his pajama pants a few inches down his thighs, leans down, and licks his cock once from root to tip. It earns her the softest of huffs through his nose, very nearly drowned out by more blasphemous fucking creaking from their neighbors' beds. Clove releases her frustration in one slow breath against his navel. It's not enough. The cavernous nothing in the air contrasted with the screaming need crackling between them. It's inadequate, and also far too much, until Clove wraps her lips around his head and swirls her tongue, and then it's perfect.

Trading breaths like words is only one of a myriad of ways in which Clove and Gale know how to communicate without speaking, she realizes now. Tongues can say plenty without making a sound; that's why Clove wanted him in her mouth so badly, and why she gave him her fingers. Hands, too, can speak volumes. Clove has a free one to hold his hips still with. Gale has one of hers and two of his own, threaded immediately into her hair, both grabbing handfuls at the base of her skull and tightening to the point of pain, and the burning says so much all on its own that Clove takes him suddenly much deeper, nearly to the base.

Gale's body snaps taut for a brief moment, and his tongue stops working around her fingers. Clove wants to growl at him, but she just nudges her fingers deeper, obtrusive enough that he gags a little. It gets the message across. His tongue reanimates with new vigor, and Clove takes him as deep as she can. There's a sound to it, now–all that saliva coating him, the slide of her lips, the low click of her tongue as it's compressed against the bottom of her mouth. In the spaces between their breaths, this makes noise, but only barely audible, just for them, the least they can possibly make.

Gale has evidently stopped worrying about being yanked out of his bunk, confident enough now to instead wrap his legs around her shoulders and anchor her to the ladder, to the bed, to him. Clove works him quickly, relentlessly, reluctant to hold either of them here too long, physically or emotionally. Gale's body shudders then relaxes then stiffens again, over and over and over, undecided on its current state, unsure how to bear having no way to relieve the mounting pressure in his chest.

Clove opens the last line of communication they have available to them. Gale's eyes were already open again, fixed on her, but the moment their eyes meet, all her silent praise and encouragement and love floods him at once, enveloping him with nearly tangible warmth despite the emptiness of the air, and his mouth falls open around her fingers, and a tear leaks down his cheek.

Clove buries her nose in the dark hair at his base, exhales hard, and says it with only her eyes. Gale scrapes together all his remaining willpower to seal his lips around her fingers one more time, then loses himself to pure, wild need. Clove's scalp burns loud as anything as he slams his eyes shut at the last possible moment, and comes down her throat without a sound.

As her fingers slip out of his mouth, Clove watches an all too familiar absence settle heavy on Gale's chest, even as he lifts his head to press a soft kiss to her ring before her hand retreats. It's wrong. She should be talking, cooing, praising. The silence should break. The scene should end, only it can't. Gale is breathing hard as he reaches for her, but seems to calm himself in the time it takes him to follow her obediently down from his bunk. Clove scoops him up as soon as his feet touch the floor, and he doesn't so much as squeak. She makes all the springs groan so Gale doesn't have to, and situates him half on top of her, head pillowed on her chest, where he belongs, where he'll calm down, where he'll sleep.

The cacophony of a train car full of sleeping people continues, but Gale has grown a new protective barrier, some new skin to weather it in. Still trembling like a caged animal, still holding too much inside his chest, still tightly-wound, but at least he's in her arms. At least when she needs to tell him that it's going to be okay, and that she loves him, and that the night will end eventually, she can simply press her lips to his scalp, and say everything she needs to say. And just as she knew it would, it works; Gale sleeps.

*

Clove opens her eyes to Gale already awake, still folded in her arms, face inches from hers, a smile on his lips, a both strange and familiar hunger in his eyes. "Good morning," he says, voice gravelly from disuse.

"Morning, baby," she croaks. "Sleep well?"

Gale brushes the hair out of her eyes. "Better than anticipated."

"Gonna survive one more night?"

His eyes flicker to her lips. "I intend to."

"Come on, then," she whispers. "Show me just how bad you want to make it to tomorrow, with a whole cabin to ourselves and nowhere to be for a week."

Gale opens his mouth, then shuts it again and kisses her instead. Clove gives him a little mmph, just because she can, and he smiles against her lips.

"I do like your voice," he murmurs.

"Yeah. Missed yours too."

For all their (mostly Gale's) complaints about the overnight aspects of this journey, the days really are lovely. A little table between them, toes touching idly underneath, engrossed in puzzles or books or the views or simple conversation, stash of edibles snuck in with the snacks, one earbud each, in easy company as they let the world pass them by. Gale has made his way through three books. Clove is nurturing a quickly deepening obsession with Sudoku.

Only today, the threat of spending tonight in a room with no door isn't hanging over Gale's head like a storm cloud. Clove isn't oblivious to his fidgeting, his eyes glazing over as he stares at a page of his book, the near translucent veneer of anxiety coating his every movement, but it's no longer dread keeping him on edge; it's anticipation. It makes Clove's stomach do flips as she works on her Sudoku. The inky black, the heavy silence, everything given and everything held back. Tonight might be different, or the same. Gale runs his toe up her calf, and Clove shivers.

Gale texts her across their little table, after dinner, just to ask if he can share the bottom bunk with her again. Like an idiot, and a sweetheart. Clove is surprised when she actually has to think about it. Gale's blush deepens the longer it takes for her to make up her mind. When she sends her reply, his crimson face crumples.

"Hey," she whispers, reaching for his hand. "Trust me?"

Gale rearranges his face into his bravest mask, squeezes her hand, and nods fiercely. "Of course."

"Wanna know something?"

He leans forward slightly, mischief ignited in an instant. "That depends if you'll feel the need to text it to me."

Clove smiles. "I don't have to text you anything, because I'm shameless, lover. And last night, when I saw you up there, all tense and sad and anxious, I couldn't stop thinking about seeing you shameless. Too far gone to worry about the strangers or the lack of a door or the squeaky springs. I couldn't help myself, with you stuck in my head like that."

Gale's eyes flicker around the train car as his flush deepens, then begins to creep down his neck. "Is that what you wanted when you put your mouth on me, then?" he asks, barely a whisper. "For me to be shameless?"

"Yeah. I don't think it worked, though, do you?"

"No," he breathes, expression abruptly guilty. "I'm sorry."

Clove frowns. "Don't be sorry, lover. I don't want you to be scared, or uncomfortable, or making noise when you don't want to just to please me. It's not even about the noise, really. I just want you to forget it all for a second or two, you know? This is a part of our vacation, too. I want you to see so fucking blissed out you're not worried anymore, but I don't want you to feel bad if it doesn't totally work. As long as you enjoy yourself, that's good enough for me. I just… want to try again. That's all I'm saying."

Gale lifts her hand to his lips, kisses every knuckle, and then her ring–one of his favorite places for his lips, recently. "My love, you may try anything you wish. I'd be a fool to refuse the offer."

"And if it's too much, or you're too anxious, you'll tell me? Even if it's not with words?"

"Yes."

"You want me?" she asks with a smile, head cocked, playing now. "Even in a room without a door?"

Gale meets her gaze, serious as anything, earnest as ever. "Desperately."

Clove has already succeeded, to an extent. Gale expressed how fervent his desire was at a perfectly conversational volume, because, even if only briefly, the strangers around them had already disappeared.

*

The strangers reappear, obviously, the moment the lights are off. Clove can sense Gale's walls closing in around him, the noises burrowing beneath his skin, his unwillingness as he climbs slowly into his creaky bunk. He was eager earlier, but this is still going to be a feat, if Clove can pull it off. She'll give it her all, if nothing else. Anything for her lover, her professor, her betrothed.

Regardless of his current misery, they have to wait a while, though, because almost nobody in this car is asleep yet, and that might be too much for even Clove to handle. There is still a near constant hum of murmured conversations, not-so-soft laughter, the creaking of mattresses being left then revisited. Inside Clove and Gale's room, as ever, there is only breathing. Only anticipation, sweet in the air. Clove's eyes are locked on the ladder to his bunk. She wonders where Gale is looking–at the ceiling, most likely, but maybe he's peering off the side of his bunk, to where her backpack lays on the floor, half unpacked.

Gale tried to insist packing the strap in her carry on was nonsensical. Clove knew better.

As the car slowly quiets around them, she can hear Gale more clearly. All his soft, unobtrusive noises. What sounds, at times, like all ten of his fingers drumming on the mattress, the many sighs and the unevenness of the breaths in between them, and much more consistently than it seems like it should be occurring, the slide of skin against fabric. Clove is caught up in visions again, but fantasizing is not enough this time–she needs to see him. She needs to know exactly what he looks like right now, and whatever he may or may not be doing. She needs to know just how much trouble he's in, her lovely moonlit statue.

Luckily, she has a perfectly good excuse to get out of her bunk. A delivery to make, of sorts. She fishes the lube out of her backpack before finally allowing herself what she wants, a reward for all her patience. The view has only improved. Hair splayed wildly over his pillow, bottom lip caught between his teeth, back arched slightly, palming himself over his pajama bottoms, head turned, and eyes fixed on her, screaming their shame. He knows he's doing wrong, and he's been caught, and he's continuing to do it anyway–just like Clove, last night. She's a little proud, actually, but she doesn't plan on letting him know that. Not right now, at any rate.

Clove steps up on the edge of her mattress. It groans loudly. She holds onto the rail of the top bunk with one hand while she tucks the lube next to Gale's hip, then grabs his wrist, and drags his hand directly from his groin to her mouth. Gale watches, breath accelerating rapidly. Clove swallows three of his fingers without warning, sucks on them until Gale's eyes roll back and slip shut, then lets her teeth graze his knuckles on their way back out, just sharp enough to make him pull in a ragged breath.

Bad.

She wraps his fingers, still slick with her saliva, around the bottle of lube before quickly stepping down. Back on her own mattress, she texts him.

if you touch yourself again, that's how you'll come tonight. just your palm over your clothes, and me down here listening.

What's the lube for, then?

getting yourself ready for me.

What are you going to do?

listen.

The cap to the lube snaps open only a few seconds later. Clove smiles. So eager.

and lover?

Yes?

make sure you're quiet.

A huff above her. Gale doesn't reply. Clove's smile widens.

It starts a little loud, then gets quiet. The creaking as he situates his clothes and his limbs, the unsteady panting as he draws close, and the long exhale as he pushes inside. Then it all fades to his muted shaky breathing and that one lone finger, which does make noise all on its own, if nearly inaudible. Clove can only hear it when the rest of the car is silent, and only because she's so familiar with it, just as Gale was so familiar with her hushed sounds last night. Clove hears every imperceptible change in his breathing, every rustle, every slide of wet on wet, and it paints a crystal clear image in her mind. She knows. Separated, bound to silence, but still tethered, still intimate, still in sync. This is why Clove wanted him to stay in his bunk for a bit.

She might keep him there a little while longer, actually.

how are you, lover?

Ready for a second.

mm, wait a little bit.

Are you enjoying yourself?

Clove slips her pants and underwear off. Her mattress voices its complaints. She slips two fingers between her folds, and ever so very fucking softly, she moans, as if in mockery of the springs. Above her, for a few screamingly loud seconds, everything falls into stillness. A neighbor rolls over–or perhaps also takes their clothes off. The activity above her finally resumes on a sigh.

I'll take that as a yes.

Clove smiles, but doesn't bother replying. She has far better uses for her hands, at the moment. She can hear the increasing desperation in Gale's movements. The one finger is not enough, so he is pumping it in and out more quickly, and the noise of it is growing more pronounced. The lube creates almost a... squelching, which Clove would not appreciate in any other context besides her little slut finger-fucking himself above her. Here, in this moment, it makes her whole body burn.

you can have more now, baby. go ahead.

Gale exhales a raspy breath as he obeys, with so much forceful air behind it that the sound comes dangerously close to a hoarse whine. Clove's breath becomes temporarily more audible than it should be in reaction to him, just for the space of two stuttered breaths as a shudder runs up her spine, and her back arches slightly off the mattress.

god, you're fucking hot.

No reply. Only panting, and two fingers hard at work.

lover.

Nothing.

Clove kicks his mattress lightly. He gasps.

I'm sorry. Texting is difficult.

too bad. you're not allowed to talk, and i won't be ignored.

You have all my attention, I assure you.

i don't think i do. i think you're too focused on your fingers, and your hole, and how bad you wanna touch yourself.

Only because of you. Only because I want you.

take your fingers out.

Gale is still panting above her, but the other sounds stop, and his hand thuds, somehow audibly disappointed, onto the mattress.

close your eyes and wait.

Gale waits. The silence makes him seem patient, but Clove knows he must be tensed in every possible way a person can be. Still, she takes her time. A few more lazy minutes touching herself, writhing a little to make sure he knows she's having a nice time. At one point, Gale's breath hitches hard, landing just a few decibels off a whimper. Clove wants to text him about it, but he won't see it, so she climbs out of bed instead.

She uses the ladder this time to grab the lube off Gale's bunk. He's a statue again, stock still, gorgeous, naked from the waist down, every muscle taut, eyes dutifully sealed shut. Even his breathing stops when he senses her presence so close, and he shifts restlessly when she climbs back down without touching him. Clove can hear the implied whine in it. She finds herself growing a little lightheaded as she gets ready. All the blood went elsewhere. God, her little slut. Always lets her do whatever she wants to him. Always willing. Always eager.

Clove stands on her bunk again. Gale jumps at the noise, then again when her palm cradles his cheek. She shushes him softly as she taps his temple. Two hungry eyes suddenly peer at her in the dark. Clove jerks her head once towards the ladder of the bunk, and steps back down.

This is the first real hurdle. This is one thing he said he couldn't do last night, and Gale does not take an admission of incapability lightly. He truly couldn't–not all plastic-wrapped, not until an odd and oddly intense orgasm made him need her arms too desperately to stay in his bunk.

Tonight, he shuffles to the end of the bed with decisive movements, ripping the band-aid off just like Clove demonstrated last night. He's climbing down the ladder within seconds. It all happens so quickly Clove almost misses her chance. Almost.

Gale still has one foot on the first rung of the ladder when Clove wraps around him from behind, arms wound under his armpits and across his chest like a cage, her cock poking his ass, her chest pressed firmly to his back, her hot breath on his neck. Gale's breathing is thunderous, whole body frozen like a deer, hands still clinging to the top rung of the ladder above his head.

Clove is panting, too. Wild fantasy come to life, all his anxious coating right up against her skin and ready to be rubbed off, her perfect fucking statue trapped hopelessly between her and a hard place. She stares curiously down at his cock, poking horizontally between two rungs of the ladder, threatening to drip precum onto her bed. She watches her ring glint in the moonlight as it trails through the hair on his chest. She can hear nothing but Gale, this close to him. The world shrinks to the surface area they occupy.

Gale seems already aware of very little except his desire to be filled, already frowning and squirming, but still, Clove hesitates. She's never fucked him from behind before–not really, not since the first time, when it went a little wrong. And there was something softer surrounding him then, too. Not a hard ladder, and cold silence. Clove wants more explicit permission for this, but first she needs a language to ask for it in.

Subtlety is useless to her. All five fingers of her right hand wrap around the base of his cock, and then wait, frozen, as she lifts her left to his mouth, and offers him his favorite stone to kiss. Gale kisses it without hesitation, and Clove gives him a few slow strokes that he writhes through.

She has to repeat the pattern only once. Teeth ghosting over his neck, she offers the ring again. Gale kisses it, and she bites hard enough to make him gasp. As soon as Clove lifts her head, he nods.

A contented sigh will have to do as praise.

Clove's cock slides, easy as anything, between his cheeks, and Gale shivers at the cold. Resting ever so lightly against his hole, Clove lifts the ring to his lips once more.

Gale kisses his acceptance. Clove sighs again, and presses inside him. The sweat on his palms makes them squeak as he readjusts his grip on the ladder, his heel drops from the ladder and hits the floor with a dull thud, and his thighs produce an odd, stuttered sort of squeak as they writhe against the wood. Clove wonders if anyone can hear them yet, even as she fucks him so slow their skin makes no noise where it connects as she bottoms out.

If only they could see all the ways Gale is already falling apart. With every agonizingly slow thrust, his cock leaks a little more mess, neglected once again. He twists his head occasionally, frantically searching for her lips to both soothe him and stoke his need. If a kiss does not immediately make itself available, he nips at whatever part of her he can reach. And, the worst of his wordless demanding, he pushes constantly back against her hips, trying to slam himself back into her and speed things up himself, since she has been so far unwilling.

Constrained by circumstance as she is, Clove can only really punish him by ignoring him, and taking her sweet time. His hips are going to have bruises from bumping against the ladder so many times, and it will only be his fault. She has all the near-soundless noises of their bodies moving together, and her lips never more than a few centimeters from his skin, and her Gale right where she wants him. She's content to do this for a good long while, and at this rate, Gale will exhaust himself far quicker than she will.

In the meantime, progress is being made. The din of the strangers surrounding them seems to intrude upon Gale's consciousness in waves. Sometimes he seems to not hear them at all. Other times he jumps at a sneeze, or freezes mid-kiss at a groaning mattress. He remains unwaveringly silent, but when the exhaustion finally catches up to him, and his legs start to shake, his lips mouth please against hers, over and over and over, and it's just as potent as his voice.

Clove's right hand lands firm on his hip, and holds him against the ladder with more force than she's used all night. As she stills for a moment, cock buried barely an inch inside him, she notices for the first time that her legs are shaking, too. She widens her stance and takes a steadying breath before slowly lifting her left hand to his lips. Gale kisses her ring with urgency, and Clove slams into him so hard the ladder shudders. The huff expelled from his lungs carries a little hint of his voice in it, more from the force of the air than from him willing it to be there. Clove moans, low and so very soft, right in his ear, only for him, and he throws his head back onto her shoulder, mouth hung wide, throat straining. All that coiled tension, all that energy, all that noise. Gale is struggling to keep it back, brow dented with the effort.

Clove offers a hand sealed over his mouth, and Gale accepts with a grateful nod, lifts his head, and braces himself against the ladder.

Fucking him this hard was always going to create noise. The occasional limb knocking against wood, the sheer volume of their panting, the soft creaking of the ladder, and the dull smack of their bodies coming together. Clove can tell when Gale is paying attention to it, because he becomes less supple in her hands, holding himself stiff enough to stifle the noise, but it never lasts long. Inevitably, he gives himself back over to her. Sometimes, the transition between the two requires biting her hand. Clove doesn't mind.

Clove has endless patience for this. For Gale. For all his silly worrying and thin skin. For the way he's so good at math, at cooking, at piano, at getting his way, at being so fucking smart, and yet sometimes he can't figure out how to just let himself be a person without getting all twisted up in knots. Clove can try to fuck him hard enough to make his worries disappear without feeling the least bit frustrated when it doesn't work, because truly, all she wanted was a chance to try. And Gale will always give her a chance. That's what he's the very best at, actually–being brave.

His emotional resilience lasts longer than his physical resilience. Clove feels it when his knees buckle, and she stills immediately, abandoning her hold of his hip to instead wrap her arm securely around his chest. Gale is being held up by only Clove and his white-knuckled grip on the ladder, shaking, panting harshly through his nose.

Clove releases his mouth, and lets him get his breath back for a couple minutes, kissing his neck aimlessly, before she lifts her ring to his lips once more.

More?

As soon as his lips touch the stone, Clove reaches up with both hands to unhook his fingers from the top of the ladder, steps them backwards, predicting Gale's little stumble well enough to catch him before he sinks an inch, then lets him cling to the ladder again as she presses forward and down, ever so slowly, arms around his chest like a seatbelt, until, with four soft thuds, one after another, all their knees hit the floor. Clove didn't slip out of him once, and she'd boast about it, if she could talk.

Gale leans forward on instinct, resting his hands and his head on the ladder, bracing himself against it once more with a shaky sigh. Clove follows him, leaving just enough space between them for her to enjoy the view. She clings to the ladder one rung above him with one hand, and the other she smooths down over his hip, then winds around to at last tend to his long neglected cock.

Too quiet for anyone but Clove, Gale whimpers. It's all she needed. There's no going back to the slow and soundless. She's never fucked him like this, not anywhere close to it, and she's so drunk on his muscles twitching in his back and the shock waves she's sending up over his waist and the power this position gives her, that she's finally forgotten all about their stupid fucking neighbors. Gale coming apart in her arms, that's all that exists. This makes noise, as it fucking should.

Her thrusts grow erratic as her muscles grow tired, and she sinks her teeth into his shoulder in encouragement. Gale's back arches, prettiest view on the fucking planet, and as he comes, finally, blessedly, unexpectedly, a sound erupts from his chest, past the impassable blockade of his throat.

It's nothing like Clove thought it would be. Not a cry, or a wail, or another half-stifled whimper. A simple groan. Low, stuttered, long, loud. A person could conceivably make this noise in their sleep, but only if they were having a very good dream, and even then, Clove would struggle to believe it. It lasts through all the strings of cum landing on her bed, until his body gives out along with his voice, and he goes limp in her arms. Clove will be wishing she had a recording of it forever.

Clove is so busy trying to keep him upright, trying to slip out of him safely so she can spin him around in her arms and pepper him with soothing kisses, that it takes her longer than it should to realize Gale has not fallen silent again. He's gasping for air, and every exhale carries his voice in it, soundwaves arranged in the vague shape of her name. Too far gone, too in need of oxygen, too exhausted to bottle it back up. Clove holds a finger to his lips, shushes him over and over, kisses him insistently, and it's all useless. Gale just shakes his head, undoes her harness, flops onto his back on the floor, and pulls her with him. Clove stumbles with all his yanking, but she knows where he's trying to guide her. It won't help him catch his breath, but the second his tongue dips between her folds, the gasping fades to a low moan, then silence.

Clove's legs were already trembling from fucking him so hard, and they shake violently now, locked around his head. She's forced to tilt forward and support herself on her hands, head bowed, trying desperately not to collapse her entire weight on top of him, but every lap of his tongue only seems to make her shake harder. Every moment enveloped in the heat of his mouth brings her closer to the edge, and she's not even sure she knows which edge. In the midst of all the chaos, though, she finds the focus to whisper to him. The first words spoken all night, too soft for anyone but the beautiful man buried between her legs.

"You did so good for me, baby. I'm so proud of you. I bet it felt good to let yourself go, didn't it? Did you feel free, lover? Did I feel so good that you forgot where you were?"

Gale digs his nails into her thighs. Seals his lips around her clit. Nods.

"You sounded so fucking beautiful," Clove pants rather than whispers. "I love hearing you. Give me just one more baby. One more moan so everyone knows you're mine when we go to breakfast tomorrow. One more, and I'll come for you, and you'll hear it."

Gale's response is somewhere between a sob and a whimper, but anything would have worked. Clove's sound is a whine, broken and exhausted. She's a puddle on the floor before her body is done convulsing with the waves of her orgasm. Beside her, so close and too fucking far away, Gale chuckles. He picks up her left hand, kisses her ring, then brushes her cheek with the backs of both their hands.

"Thank you, my love," he whispers.

Clove just sighs, and nuzzles into his touch, content. Got everything she wanted. Maybe even a little more. Spoiled to the ends of the earth, and they're not even fully on vacation yet.

They lay flat on their backs for a while, panting, and then Gale does most of the labor involved (emotionally speaking, anyway) in getting them both into Clove's bunk. He positions himself the same as Clove did last night. Head pillowed on her chest, laying more on her than the mattress, one hand folded into hers. He hums when he's all settled, a soft little thing that makes go Clove warm from head to toe.

Clove wonders how many people heard him, just before she drops off to sleep. Certainly, they can hear his snoring.