Work Text:
At night, the collar comes off. The ship is quiet, the sea a gentle sway beneath the hull. Stede watches the deft, quick movements of Ed’s fingers as, silhouetted against the candlelight in the cabin, he makes easy work of the clasp in the back. Listens to the tinkle of the bell as Ed gently sets the collar down on the desk, where the bell gleams in the low light. Ed heads off to the washroom to get ready before he undresses, blushing as he mutters something about smelling like fish as he goes.
Stede sits down on the bed once the door clicks shut. Overwhelmed, he thinks, with everything. They kissed, again. It makes Stede feel a bit giddy just thinking about it. It wasn’t a goodbye kiss, or an I need you to know this immediately kiss. It was simply a kiss because they could. Because they love each other. Because that’s what being in love means.
Stede has read more romance novels than he could count. Has lived in their fantastical worlds, with their heroes and heroines, and imagined finding his own. This one, he thinks as Ed emerges from the washroom in a loose pair of pants and his hair tumbling down over his shoulders, is the best one of all. This is the love story those novels are about, the kind that sticks to the roof of your mouth and lingers on the back of your tongue.
They touch when they pass each other, Ed on his way to the nook, Stede to replace him in the washroom. Hands on shoulders, waists. Unconscious, tactile touches, the way they’ve always been. Ed smiles, fond, and Stede smiles back. Easy. It’s all so easy, and Stede loves every second of it.
When Stede returns to the cabin, washed up and clad in a nightshirt and smallclothes, only one candle remains lit, its solitary light no match for the darkness pressing in from the corners of the expansive room. Ed has turned down the covers on the bed and climbed under them, back to the windows, the gauze curtains half-drawn. The corner of the sheets on Stede’s side are flipped back, ready for him. A silent statement, an implied affection. Impossibly, Stede falls even more in love.
He blows out the candle on his way, the wisps of smoke and the scent of it following him as he navigates through muscle memory and moonlight, over this one creaky floorboard the builders had never put in right, over a cluster of knife gouges that neither of them bring up. The cabin has its own chapters, too, and some of them Stede has no plans to revisit.
Once he makes it to the bed, he pulls the covers up and slides in, leaning in to press a kiss to Ed’s cheek. His skin smells like eucalyptus, and it crinkles at the apples of his cheeks under the quick, dry press of Stede’s lips. The hair at his temple is damp, sweet-smelling.
Stede gets settled in, humming in contentment as he finds Ed’s leg under the covers and brushes it with his own. Can hardly believe he gets to do this, have Ed in his bed, able to brush the soft-coarse hair of their legs and knock their knees gently as they scoot closer.
“How’s cuddling sound tonight, darling? Is that too much?” Stede whispers, looking at Ed from across the pillows.
Ed raises one shoulder, outlined in the thin moonlight coming in through the window. “Suppose I could do a cuddle, yeah. If you want.”
He’s looking at him in the dark with those big, imploring eyes. Too afraid to ask himself, too afraid to say yes without knowing if Stede wants it, too. He’s handing over the reins, Stede realises with a lightning-fast jolt. Letting him set the pace, figure out which steps they want to take and how they want to take them.
A relationship is a lot like teamwork, Stede’s figuring out as he and Ed learn to live around each other with this new dynamic in place. There’s a bit of give-and-take to it that wasn’t fully present in Stede’s marriage. Ed set the pace on the deck with his bell and his gentle request of slow, and he’s asking Stede to set the pace down here. Making it equal, making the decision mutual.
The truth is, Stede will do anything Ed asks. He’s waited this long; he’ll wait a lifetime longer if he needs to. As long as Ed is comfortable, Stede is comfortable. This isn't a whim anymore; they rushed into things the first time around. This time, they don’t need to.
Stede reaches out; Ed meets him halfway, twining their fingers together. He squeezes and Stede squeezes back. The tightness in his body seems to loosen, and Stede's chest aches with how his heart seems to grow with affection for this wonderful, complicated man. Sometimes he isn’t sure how he can contain it all. Sometimes, he wants to get on the main top and shout it to the sea on all sides of them.
”I want to make sure you’re comfortable,” Stede says. “We can cuddle. Or we can stay just like this.”
Ed hesitates. Does that little thing with his mouth, where it goes into a flat line as he thinks. Eventually, he asks, “Can we touch? Before we cuddle. I want to see you. If that’s okay. Like a—a non-sexual intimacy. Think that’s what it’s called.”
Oh, Stede thinks, aching with it.
”Of course that’s okay, Edward,” he says softly.
Softly. Slowly. How similar those two words are. How they both speak of hesitation, but the good kind. Taking it slow, keeping it soft. Deep breaths in, shy little smiles, before covers are inched down to waists, before Stede sits up to strip off his shirt, leaving him in his smallclothes. Doesn’t miss the sharp inhale from Ed, nor the slight, wondrous widening of his eyes while he wriggles back under the sheets. Then: hands touching arms, touching chests. Eyes, roving, allowed to look, allowed to admire. Rapid hearts, softly parted lips, hesitant fingers that tremble when gooseflesh arise in their wake.
“Never told you before,” Ed says in a quiet rumble when he trails fingers across Stede’s collarbone, lower down through the wisps of blond-grey hair that curl there, “but I’ve always thought you were so handsome.”
A midnight confession. Hushed in its secrecy. Spoken to this room that, not too long ago, despaired.
Stede blooms warm from head to toe, cheeks heating as he ducks his head and smiles. It feels as if he could float away on this feeling alone. His hand rests in the curve of Ed’s hip, over soft skin, the faint keloid slashes of old scars. Being run through is an art, Ed had once said with a strained laugh, and Stede’s always been an appreciator of art. “Yeah?" he says. "Well, I’ve always thought you were incredibly handsome yourself, my darling. Even when I was gut-stabbed and half-hanged.”
They smile at each other. Hook their pinkies together under the sheets. Gently, Ed walks his fingers on the mattress over to Stede’s, tangles those together, too. The calluses on Ed’s catch against the new calluses on Stede’s. Slow means simple. Soft means affection so bright they have to squint their eyes in its presence.
“I jerked off in the washroom a bit ago, thinking of you,” Ed says into the silence of the room, turning his face to the pillow and smushing his nose against it, hiding himself from his own admission. “Not when I was changing, ‘course,'' he adds, somewhat muffled. “Just—earlier. Before I joined Fang on the dingy.”
Stede freezes. Forgets how to breathe. Thinks his fingers tighten a bit too much on Ed’s as his mind begins working in overdrive, supplying him with hazy images of Ed, pressed against the wall with head tossed back in pleasure, a hand wrapped around his cock and that damnable bell jingling with his movements as he brought himself off. An answering pulse of arousal runs through him as he imagines the shape of Ed's mouth on a moan, what his slick, flushed cockhead would look moving in and out of his fist.
He tries to inhale, and it comes out as a strangled choke.
“I thought you wanted to take it slow!”
“That was before I said that! Besides, it doesn’t mean I can’t think about what I want to do to you, mate.” Ed pauses, turning his face from the pillow to look at Stede with a hair-obscured eye. He shakes his head to get the strands away. “Or does it? Shit. I don’t know what the protocol is here.”
Stede swallows hard, lets his eyes roam from Ed’s face, down his throat, across the swath of his torso above the covers. Back up, up, to the flush across Ed’s cheekbones.
Slow can mean a lot of things, he’s discovering. It doesn’t necessarily have to mean a complete absence of. Slow can—it can be talking. Telling each other. It can be learning each other, inside and out, before they take that next step.
“Tell me,” he says, feeling a little spark of arousal flicker in his gut. “We don’t…have to do anything, but this could be—it could be nice, I think. To get to know each other’s fantasies before we, um. Go any further.”
“Yeah?” Ed asks, hesitantly.
Stede nods. His heart picks up its pace. He shifts his legs, tangles their ankles together, sharp bones knocking, a jagged little fissure running through him when Ed’s toes nudge the ticklish arch of his foot.
“I want to know,” Stede replies. “I—I’ve thought of you over the months. A lot, in fact.”
“Did you, now?” Ed’s voice dips lower, scrapes gravel as his lashes flutter. “What did you think, Stede?” Ed holds their hands tighter, inches his way in closer. The moonlight turns his hair gunmetal, makes the silver seem to shine even brighter. He's beautiful, and Stede doesn’t understand how he got so lucky.
“I thought about kissing you,” says Stede, looking down at Ed’s lips. Slow, he reminds himself, even as the fizzle of desire quickly begins to become a steady boil.
“Is that all? We could do that right now, mate.”
“Hush,” says Stede, though he’s smiling. “Kissing you while I, um. Well, while I…touch you. Everywhere. That’s what I’ve thought about.”
“That so?” Ed asks, words gone a bit breathless, eyes gone a bit hooded as he inches closer on the pillow. His breath is warm on Stede’s chest and neck, sweet with brandy. His lips are slick from his tongue. “I think about kissing you while I touch you, too. Sometimes I even think about kissing you after I’ve sucked your cock so you can taste yourself.”
Stede lets out a tiny groan before he can stop it.
“Edward!”
Slow, he reminds himself as lust slams through him so thoroughly his vision unfocuses. Can’t mess this up, can’t move forward those few inches between them to touch the hair on Ed’s belly, follow it as it gets thicker, down to where the root of his cock is, no matter how much he wants to.
“Is that a good Edward or a bad Edward?” asks Ed, a tease in it.
Stede swallows, trying to inch his hips back, where his cock has begun to fill out in his smallclothes to rest heavy and fat against his thigh. The heat pools in his belly, condensing at the base of his spine and throbbing through him. “Can it be both?”
Slow, he says again as Ed smiles at him, rubbing his thumb over Stede’s. Back-forth, back-forth. Slow, he says as he rubs back. There’s so much time in front of them. There are so many moments just ahead for them to take eventually. Slow means learning intimacy, both sexual and non-sexual. How their bodies fit together, what they like, how they look.
Ed chuckles, leaning forward to press their lips together. Their hands untangle to cup faces and necks and the slopes of skulls. The sheets rustle around them, sliding down over the curves of buttocks. Stede swallows back a moan; Ed does the same. And Stede knows, now. Knows the shape and vibration of Ed's pleasure against his mouth. Knows how his spine goes taut with it, his body arching forward. The things you learn about your partner that you never can fully unlearn.
“Think a lot about kissing you while you fuck me,” Ed says before gently biting Stede’s lower lip. Tugs as he retreats, a thin line of saliva connecting them before it breaks. He sighs. “Fuckin’ love being kissed while I’m being fucked. Wanna whimper into your mouth, Stede.”
Immediately, Stede whimpers into Ed’s mouth, and Ed breathes, grasping a handful of Stede’s hair, “Yeah, just like that, love."
Slow, Stede says. Sometimes, though, Stede feels as if his need for Ed is a physical thing, pushing on him, edging him forward. Sometimes, when he’s holding Ed’s hand, or sitting next to him with their shoulders touching, it’s too much. Sometimes, Stede remembers that he’s in love and loved in return for the first time in his life, and it overwhelms him so much that he reaches for Ed—because he’s never far, always around, always looking at Stede—and kisses him. Those moments, they both have to repeat it, slow, and step back with guilty, bashful smiles.
There is so much time, and yet not enough of it.
“I want to suck your cock,” says Stede, pulling back with a gasp. His eyes dart down to the shadows between them; even in the moonlight Stede can see the hair on Ed’s belly, see the heavy press of Ed’s cock through his pants where they’re pulled low and tight over its shape. Desire is still new to him, and Stede finds himself chasing it eagerly. “God, I’ve thought about it so much, Ed. How you’d sound. What you would—would taste like on my tongue.”
“Oh, fuck,” replies Ed, eyes wide and dark, shuddering. He backs up a bit, putting some more space between them, nearly knocking into the wall and windows. Under the sheets his hips twitch, as if he’s stopping himself from grinding them forward. Stede’s own prick aches in sympathy between his legs. “Okay,” Ed says tightly, “fuck. Maybe that was too much.”
“This was your bloody idea!” squeaks Stede, tilting his own hips away from the mattress. His arse is nearly on the edge of the bed, so he hopes Ed doesn’t need him to go any further, because it isn’t happening.
"You agreed to it, too! Forgot how fuckin’ hot you are when you want it,” Ed defends with a groan, pressing his palms to his eyes. Rolling onto his back, he says, “God, all right, slow. We’re taking this so fucking slow. Slowest thing I’ve ever fuckin’ taken is what this is gonna be.”
Slow. Stede sucks in several deep breaths and thinks about dead seagulls and cannonballs. Slow. He can do it.
——
Slow for both of them lasts for exactly two more days. The morning of the third day Stede wakes pressed to Ed’s back, his hard cock pressed above the curve of Ed’s arse through the other nightshirt he unearthed from the closet to give to Ed. When Stede blinks fully awake, realising what’s happening, he goes to pull away; a hand coming around to grip onto his thigh stops him.
Ed twists to look, sleepy but flushed, hair wild, creases in his face from the pillow and wide dark eyes, and says, “It’s okay, if you want to.”
”Fuck,” Stede swears, and Ed laughs, rough from sleep. Then they’re both scrambling to push up their nightshirts, tug down their smallclothes. Then Stede’s cock is pressed bare and hot between Ed’s cheeks, and Ed is pushing back, grinding, moaning, “Oh, fuck, yeah,” and Stede is pushing Ed’s hair to the side and gasping against the back of his neck as he grips Ed’s hip and rocks against him.
Sometimes, slow doesn’t have to be very slow at all. It can last as long as you need it to, and be as slow as you need it to. Subjective. Arbitrary. Pushed aside in favour of grunts and moans and the slick shift of skin-on-skin.
Stede comes with a grunt across Ed’s bare lower back, forehead pressed to the nape of Ed’s neck, and Ed comes seconds later across his knuckles and the sheets with a quiet, overwhelmed moan, saying in a whine, “Kiss me, Stede, kiss me.”
Stede does. And he does, and he does, until he discovers that kissing makes your lips sore, and that he loves it. And they forget slow again a half-hour later, in loose, unhurried rolls of their bodies, cocks sliding slick over one another. Again, later, the sun lower in the sky, when Stede learns what it’s like to kiss someone as they come.
”I love you,” he says, catching his breath, sprawled out naked and sticky with sweat and semen, Ed’s head on his chest and his arm already going numb under Ed’s shoulders.
Ed doesn’t hesitate. “I love you, too.”