Work Text:
Sweat
Underground had been...not exactly cold, but certainly never hot, not the heat of this Coney Island summer night.
Erik remembered working for hours, days even, in his underground lair and never breaking a sweat. His exertions above ground, in the Opera House walls, or high over the stage on the catwalks, amongst the ropes and pulleys, amid the billowing swells of changing realities detailed on the suspended backdrops, may have gotten his heart beating faster, his temperature elevated.
But there had been the mask, and the wig, and the hat over all to contain any errant drops of perspiration, any tangible evidence that could betray him as not a ghost, but merely a man.
Tonight, though, in the swelter of the darkness, the heat such that Meg had unpinned her hair, to fall loose, bright waves in the black night, then shed her shawl...and then more and more, layers and laces...until it had led to them here, together, on the carousel, holding each other more closely than the humid dark held them both—tonight, he was more a man than he had ever been.
No hat, no wig, no mask...nothing between his skin and the night air, and the blistering heat of the woman in his arms.
He felt the prickle of sweat at his hairline, oddly aware of it amid the onslaught of innumerable physical sensations, felt it bead and slide down, tickling his face where he had feeling, heightening to a caress as it crossed into areas of hypersensitivity, then passing from any sensation at all before emerging to feeling once again, further along its path, a cloud shadow lost briefly in the depths between the swells of rolling hills.
Eventually, it reached his jaw, running along the steep angle created as he nuzzled against Meg, and he smiled.
Smiled to think of that bead, poised to drop to the peak of Meg’s breast below, then sliding, tickling and teasing down to follow the hidden swell of the undercurve of her breast, easing low and lower to mingle with her sweat which he felt slipping against him with their every move. A drop in an ocean, the ocean of feeling between them as they embraced each other, as the night embraced them both.
Oh how he envied that little drop its journey, and he resolved before the night was over to let it lead him downward, to trace the path it had taken, to taste his own salt on her skin in dark midnight kisses.
