Chapter Text
[an indeterminate amount of time later]
You wake in the pale predawn, the space beside you empty. From the far corner of the room is the rustle of cloth, the clink of his belt as he readies himself for departure.
“Arthur,” you murmur, turning your head towards him. “You planning on leaving without even sayin’ goodbye?”
“Didn’t want to wake you just yet.”
Pulling the covers back, you sit up and rub the sleep from your eyes with the back of your hand. “Well, I’m awake now. So c’mere. Gimme a proper farewell.”
Arthur heaves an exasperated sigh. “C’mon now, darlin’ — I ain’t gonna be gone but for a couple hours...”
“Humor me. Please?”
His boots creak against the wooden floorboards as he makes his way towards you. When he reaches the bed, he kneels, allowing you to wrap your arms around his neck and press a chaste kiss to his forehead.
He presses a hand to your waist to draw you closer, and you yelp, playfully slapping at his arm. “God, Arthur — your hands are freezing!”
“Help me warm ‘em, then.” Tracing a path up your spine, he presses his cold palm upwards until he reaches the flat space between your shoulder blades. You shiver under his touch, but not just from the chill, no — he can hear that familiar tremble of arousal in your breathing, and having heard it, feels himself stir in response.
His other hand slides down to the small of your back and gives you an insistent little shove towards the edge of the mattress that you’re more than happy to comply with.
“Thought you were in a hurry to leave…”
“Hush now, ‘fore I change my mind.”
You thread your fingers through his dark blond hair as he presses his mouth to your knee, then licks a line towards your center.
“Gotta admit, I’m a little surprised,” you say, resting your thighs against the slope of his shoulders, grinning when you feel him tense up beneath you, his entire body rigid with anticipation. “Usually a lot harder to convince you to stay and —”
Your voice falters as he drags the flat of his tongue against your core, and you lie back against the sheets again, idly stroking his hair as you shut your eyes to luxuriate in the warm, slow rise of pleasure.
“Arthur,” you murmur, for no other reason than to savor the feeling of his name in your mouth. The syllables of it repeated so often that the mere act of saying it is a comfort. “Arthur, oh Arthur — ”
He tightens his grip as he laps at you, his thumb pressing down firm against the hollow of your hip, then coaxes you with long, lingering swipes of his tongue that draw from you a shivery moan, then quickening little gasps as you near your peak.
Right when you’re about to crest, he abruptly pulls away, wiping his face clean with his shirtsleeve as he stands up, a wry little smile on his lips as he looks you over. “Give you somethin’ to look forward to later.”
You narrow your eyes at him and sit up, flushed and disheveled and thoroughly annoyed. “Excuse me, what? ”
Outside, the warm light of dawn is thickening in the crisp spring air. Arthur glances at the window and picks his hat up from the peg on the wall. “Gotta get goin’ soon if I aim to catch anything decent.”
“You can’t just -- ” Exasperated, you motion towards the papers strewn messily along the length of the kitchen table. “I’m not gonna be able to get anything done today if you leave me like this.”
“Sure you will,” he says, picking up the rod from its resting spot beside the door.
You give out an irritated little huff. Moving a hand between your thighs, you draw a finger along your slit. “Maybe I’ll just take care of it myself.”
“Could do that,” Arthur acknowledges. “Or you can wait for me to come back and finish what I started.”
“Better make it worth the wait,” you say crossly.
“Oh I will,” he says. “That I will.”
———
Sighing, you sort through the sheaf of finished sketches, separating them into three categories: flora, fauna, landscape. Violet snowdrops and crocus, a pack of coyotes darting across a mountain path, steam rising over the hot springs in Ambarino…
Lingering a moment on a colored sketch of an oriole, you run your fingers over the puckered paper and smile. He’d been hesitant to take to watercolors at first. Doubted his ability to do them any justice. But during the first half of his stay at the sanatorium, there’d been precious little else to occupy himself with, and his practice has clearly paid off.
Then there are your own disjointed notes: loose sheets of paper scrawled full of fragments of description, pages of thrice-revised outlines, entire paragraphs crossed out with black ink. Separated by topic and haphazardly shuffled into a tentative chronology. There’s a long way to go yet, but the bones are there.
You smooth your palm over your belly and sit there for a moment, idly wondering, idly dreaming. It’s been six weeks since your last monthly, and though two weeks isn’t much to hope on, still your heart leaps into your throat at the very thought of it.
As many times as it takes , he’d promised you that sunset so many months ago. Wrapped in that vow was a determination so fierce and desperate that to doubt him would have been akin to condemning him. And so you’d held those few, remaining scraps of hope tight in your fist, through Roanoke Ridge to Manzanita Post, through his slow recuperation to the long trek westwards.
A homestead. The people he’d loved best just a stone’s throw away. The publisher in Vancouver finally receptive. All of it so precious and so hard-won that even now, with the truth of it spoken plain by the warmth of him in your sheets at night and the reassurance of his presence into morning, all of it seems an impossible idyll.
Shaking your head to clear your thoughts, you tear out a clean page from your notebook and begin to write.
———
It’s early afternoon when he returns, with both Charles and two steelhead trout in tow. Occupied as you are with scattering chicken feed and scolding one of the hens for laying her eggs in inconvenient locations, you don’t hear them approach.
“Really? In the cabbages? Why can’t you just lay them in the coop like all the other—”
Arthur walks up behind you and claps both his hands to your shoulders. You shriek and drop the feed basket, scattering grain across the dirt. The chickens descend upon the spilt food in a maelstrom of feathers and frantic clucks.
You turn to face him, scowling deeply. He gives you a chaste little kiss on your forehead to mirror the one you’d given him in the morning, and you swat at him in response.
“Should’ve come with us this time,” Charles says quickly, stepping in to deescalate. “Got a pretty decent haul.”
“I wanted to, but…” you grimace as you sweep the excess feed back into the basket with your hand. “Putting together a manuscript’s a lot more work than I thought it’d be.”
“Did you want me to take another look at it?”
“Please,” you reply, with an apologetic, sheepish smile.
Arthur fillets the steelhead by the stove as Charles flips through some of the pages you’ve finished, pointing out suggestions here and there. “I don’t think most people are gonna want three whole pages about cicadas,” he says. “Might want to take out this bit about moss, too.”
“You’re probably right,” you concede glumly, drawing a line through the six paragraphs you’d written on bryophyta.
“So you’ll listen when Charles tells you to stop writing about moss, but not me?” Arthur asks, glancing over his shoulder.
You throw the piece of bread you’d been using as an eraser at his head.
Lunch is a late but leisurely affair. Pan fried steelfish with rice and dumplings on the side. The three of you chat about rumors of the fabled Jack Hall gang’s hidden stash in Cotorra Springs and the changing of the season, all patterns suggesting an early summer. You groan, dreading the inevitable mosquitoes.
At one point, Charles mentions the shy homesteader who brings eggs and jam to sell every Monday at market, but you are nosy and Arthur is smug, and he quickly changes the subject.
You keep your hand on Arthur’s thigh throughout the conversation, inching your fingers upwards until he abruptly stands up, his face beet red, and says that he’s going to the outhouse. When he comes back, he slides his chair some distance from your own, and you grin at him with your elbow propped against the table, holding your head in your hand with the triumphant look of someone who’s won a contest.
It’s nearly sunset by the time you start clearing the plates. You swat Charles with a dishrag when he insists on lending a hand. “Just talk to me while I wash,” you tell him. “Makes it go quicker.”
Every time you hand Arthur a dish to dry off, you let your fingertips linger on the back of his hand. The kind of incidental touch that speaks volumes in the reluctance of its departure, a brief instant that implies a quiet wish for a deeper, fuller kind of intimacy.
After plans for next week have been made and all the cutlery put away, Charles sets off towards the main road. The moment he’s out of sight, Arthur locks the door and turns back to you, his face stern, his voice low and rough. “You done playin’ now?”
The kitchen table stands as a barrier between you both. Arthur takes a step to the right of it, and you mirror him, shifting leftwards. Then he takes a step left, and you mirror him again , shifting to the right with clear provocation in your eyes.
He sighs and runs his hand through his hair in exasperation. “Ain’t you had enough foreplay today?”
But there’s a gleam in his eye that you recognize immediately. The same kind of excitement that precedes both violence and arousal. A sort of predatory impulse.
“You know I’m faster than you,” he says. He spaces his feet apart and relaxes his knees, the way he always does when he’s gearing up for a fight.
“Then give me a head start.”
Arthur scoffs at this, but doesn’t say no. Instead, he looks you dead in the eye and says, “Ten seconds. Starting now. One.”
You make for the back door immediately, leaving it wide open behind you as you scramble down the steps and across the grass. Soon you catch your stride, and you sprint eastwards, past the chicken coop and towards the creekbed.
It takes a moment for your eyes to adjust to the dim evening light, so it’s sound rather than sight that first alerts you to Arthur’s approach. Quick, heavy footfalls, each one a little louder than the last. Then the sound of his voice, calling to you from across the field.
“Ten whole seconds and this’s the best you can do?”
“That was hardly even five!” you yell back.
You’re almost to the barn when he seizes you from behind, wrapping his arms around your waist and bringing you crashing down atop him.
The sheer exhilaration of it all has you giddy as a schoolgirl as he rolls over, trapping you beneath him. You squirm until you’re able to flip yourself onto your back and kiss him, but all your levity evaporates when you realize he’s taking too long to catch his breath. Furrowing your brow, you put your hand to his chest. He lays his own over top to keep it pressed there against the hard line of his sternum, and shakes his head.
“I’m alright,” he replies. His voice is hoarse.
“I’ll get the tonic—”
“No need.” Arthur keeps his grip tight around your waist, rests his chin on your shoulder as his breathing calms. “See? It’s fine.”
You make an unsatisfied noise.
“Aw, don’t be mad,” he murmurs, hiking up your skirt.
“I’m not mad , I’m worried that —”
He nips you on the junction between your neck and shoulder and slips his hand between your thighs to trace the inseam of your bloomers, stopping just short of where you want him. When he grinds against you, erection already straining against the fabric of his pants, you whimper and roll your hips to grind back — until, hit by a sudden revelation, you abruptly stop.
“Wait a sec, Arthur — Arthur , c’mon --”
“Hm?”
“Grass stains,” you say, and he relents, getting up off the ground and pulling you to your feet. You check your skirt for any hint of green, brushing stray blades of grass off your clothes, then yelp when he picks you up off the ground, one hand supporting your back as he hooks his arm behind your knees.
“Plenty of time for that later,” he says, carrying you back inside.
———
Charles is scarcely halfway down the hill when realizes he’s forgotten his hat.
He starts walking back to retrieve it, but is quickly greeted with the mortifying sound of two grown adults rolling around in the grass and giggling like lovesick teenagers. Rolling his eyes, he promptly turns around and heads directly home.
———
“Had me distracted all day,” you tell him as he lays you across the mattress. “Couldn’t even get a page’s worth of writing done.”
Your skirt and bloomers are lying somewhere between the backdoor and the kitchen table. His shirt is hanging precariously from the back of a chair. He’s hard at work now removing the last of your clothes, unbuttoning your shirt with one hand as he frees himself from his pants with the other.
Probably need to take him to the barber soon , you consider as he tugs his trousers down his hips. His hair’s nearly long enough to touch his shoulders now, but it gives him a half-tamed, wild sort of air that suits him, and that you’re reluctant to have shorn away.
Maybe you’ll leave it alone. Just for now. As an experiment.
As you tuck his hair behind his ear, he lowers his head and presses a kiss to your breastbone, then another to the underside of your jaw. He takes himself in hand and runs the tip of his cock along the wet line of your slit, then looks to you for permission. And when you nod, he closes his eyes and utters a low, satisfied groan as he slides himself inside.
“So good,” he murmurs. “How’re you always so good?”
“You’ve given me a lot of practice these past few years,” you answer drily. Then, raising your eyes to his, you lick your lips the way you always do when you want to be kissed. And Arthur acquiesces to the unspoken request immediately, kissing you hard as he eases himself into a slow, gentle rhythm.
“My poor girl,” he says. His voice is low, with a note of tenderness in it that hurts like the echo of an old scar. “Waitin’ all day for me to come home and fuck her proper.”
“ Suffering all day is more like it.”
“Couldn’t even get a page written,” he teases. “Tell me what you were thinkin’ about instead.”
“Oh, lots of things,” you reply absently, rolling your hips in time with his thrusts. He lets out a harsh breath at the reciprocation and briefly has to squeeze his eyes shut to rein himself in. “Most of ‘em either about this morning or the thing you said to me last night.”
He frowns, trying to remember. “Last night?”
You lay your hand on the back of his neck and pull him towards you, then whisper in his ear. “Told me that from now on you were gonna keep me full with either your cock or your come.”
“I said that out loud?” he asks, looking supremely embarrassed.
“Said a couple other things I'm saving for later, too.”
Arthur buries his face against your neck, mortified. “Christ. Can’t even control my goddamn mouth when I’m inside you like this.”
A bit of agitation is always a good thing to spark in him during his lovemaking. It helps mute the lingering part of his psyche that keeps convincing him you’ll break apart at his touch, that he’ll hurt you somehow, because what is he at his core but a simple brute, a creature whose hands are made only to rend and tear the things dearest to him?
But there’s no delicacy or fear in the way that he’s taking you now, digging his fingers into your hips as he fucks into you, panting hard as he mouths at your breasts and sucks at the skin hard enough to bruise. No hesitancy in the instinctual drive of his thrusts, quicker and rougher now as he gives into his own mounting pleasure.
“Such a pretty little thing,” he breathes. He puts his palm to your waist and traces it up to the curve of your chest, the look in his eyes reverent at the expanse of your body he’s able to cover with just one hand.
“ Your pretty little thing,” you reply, correcting him.
He abruptly pulls out. Before you can react, Arthur turns you over on your stomach and pushes himself back inside, hilting so quick and deep that you feel it all the way to your center.
You whimper something incoherent and curl your fingers into the sheets.
“Yeah,” he rasps, rolling onto his side so he can better wrap his arms around you, keeping you pressed so close that his motions become yours, and yours his. “That’s right. Mine .”
Whenever he holds you like this, the disparity in strength and size is at once distressingly apparent. It leaves you completely at his mercy, like a prey animal borne down and trapped, helpless and yielding. But what looks like subjugation is in fact domestication — the predator tamed and gentled, curled around you to offer the refuge of his body.
His hand travels between your thighs to stroke at your clit, and you make a small, soft noise somewhere between a sigh and moan. A sudden rush of pleasure ripples through your core like a sinew pulled taut.
“I love you,” you pant out. Admitting it comes as natural as your own breath now. “Love you so much , Arthur.”
The words seem to break something in him. You hear his shuddery inhale, the barely suppressed groan as he presses a hand against your belly and growls, “Gonna give you all of me, girl. Fill you up so good you’ll be drippin’ for days …”
Then he tugs at your waist and angles his hips in such a way that he’s able to sink himself even deeper. And it aches , oh, it aches with such a sweet, blunt pang that you let out a pathetic mewl in response.
“Love you too,” he says, voice so low you can hardly hear it. His breath is hot against the back of your neck, and when he nips at your shoulder, you shiver and whine. “So much I can hardly stand it.
His fingers are slick as he works you over, coaxing out your orgasm as the rhythm of his own thrusts become sloppy and uneven. “Go ahead and come on my cock,” he murmurs. “Let go for me, darlin’.”
It’s a command, not a request. And you comply beautifully, trembling against him as the clench and flutter of your orgasm washes over you, crying out so loud that you barely register his whispered fucking christ .
With a hoarse shout, he spills inside you, clutching you to his chest with all the desperation of a man so starved of intimacy that the very taste of it overwhelms him. And you can feel the pulse and twitch of him, the slick warmth of his seed, the jump of muscle and synapse as he drives himself home.
For a long while the both of you just lay there, exhausted and limp. When he finally does uncouple, he slides himself out slow and careful, briefly pressing two fingers to your slit to stem the flow of his semen.
You wince. “I’m still pretty sensitive down there, you know.”
Arthur pats you on the head. “Just makin’ good on what I told you last night,” he replies drowsily. “Said I’d keep you full, and I intend to follow through.”
He dozes off quick, with his arms still wrapped around you. A few hours from now, you’ll inevitably wake up uncomfortably warm and have to pry yourself out from underneath his considerable bulk, but it’s a small price to pay for the luxury of falling asleep beside him.
You run a hand down his forearm, feeling the contours of muscle and bone underneath. He’s still a little too thin, a little too worn… your worries regarding his health still remain, but at the very least they’ve shifted to the long-term instead of the immediate.
But he is mending. All of him — lungs, wounds, heart. Day by day he grows a little stronger, recovers a bit of his former vigor. He’s not yet where he should be, but there’s plenty of time to get there.
It’s enough progress that even you, with your stubborn cynicism, have begun to consider the disquieting, but growing likelihood that everything is alright. That even if the scars of the past remain, they fade with time. That in spite of all that’s happened, you might be allowed the comfort of mundanity.
Arthur is snoring a little. He mumbles something nonsensical as he dreams and rests his hand against your belly. In the soft dark, you lace your fingers with his and smile, then close your eyes. And you sleep.