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Color of lemon, mango, peach.
― Sylvia Plath, Southern Sunrise
The sun is a grapefruit. Through the open window, bustle and clangs from the harbor eddy into the room. The curtains billow like ship sails; daylight splashes in, sea-wild, smears the floors and carpet and the wrinkled bedding.
A knuckle teases your cheek. Your eyelids tighten. No, a little longer, you mumble—or think you mumble, for it might come out as a garbled, throat-deep grunt.
“You already got an extra hour, love. Now you're just being greedy,” he reprimands you, though not really—he knows a thing or two about greed.
You can picture Astarion from the clear tone of his voice: fresh and preened and dapper-dressed, ivory locks arranged in effortless curls, shrouded in that scent of ripe citrus, heady liquor and evergreen that makes your mouth water. The mattress dips where he sits and your body reclines in his direction, pulled in by gravity. Belly down, you rest with one knee folded up for balance, and you're growling again, your face twisting away into the plumpness of the pillow that your arms hug close.
“I'll get up, I swear,” you mutter.
“You've never sounded more persuasive,” he mocks.
You don't rebut or respond and he thinks you've boarded the ship to dreams again. As much as he'd like to join you in aestivation, loll in the sun together like cats on a roof without a care in the world, there's still that heap of awful, responsible, urgent things to do, and companions to do it with waiting downstairs. He huffs and air slaps your shoulder. Oh, to think you're forcing him to act as the responsible one—that's the real offense.
Astarion's fingers play with the light—gold arrowheads, soft as feathers—skewed, unbalanced and all smudged up in the curves of your legs, snuggling a piece of your waist. Often, he wonders about what it'll be like to lose the sun again, to have this recently reacquired companion backstab him, and meditations on the matter are as swiftly discarded as they come. He wants to think about the future, just not that future—at least not yet. Instead, he looks at you in your bath of bright linen, and he thinks of fruits displayed on merchant stalls in Rivington, fuzzy peaches, pearls of dew scuttling down the skin of violet grapes, tangerines waiting for fingers to peel them naked.
Since defeating Cazador, he finds himself wanting things differently, as in, the outlines of his own desires curve rounder now, more vivid, graspable without that barbed edge that threatened to bloody him like before. He aligns his desires with care, sprawls them and dissects them longly before he decides whether they're something he wants or something he thinks he wants. Sometimes it's easy, sometimes it isn't.
This is an easy one.
His palm muddles the sun-glossed rectangle on your ribs. The gown you wear to sleep is pale, gossamer thin—you might as well be wearing nothing at all—and it creases under his touch, unveils your skin all slashed from the imprints of bedsheets. You cast him a perplexed glance from over your shoulder. His eyes meet yours, ruby bleeding into amber from the incandescent morning. It's one of Astarion's favorite hours, when the sun is still congenial, not yet aggressive and molten. It's one of your favorites too, for different reasons—any hour in which he exists is your favorite, whether it's to follow echoes of the moon or the infallible sun.
His hand trails up the hillock of your hip, curves to the back of your thigh, his fingers crafting five notches in your flesh. With pinched eyebrows, you murmur his name—a question, a warning, an invitation.
On his fourth finger, he carries a signet ring. It isn't brand new, the silver band scuffed, oxidized to a midnight blue. He found it while rummaging around an antiques shop. It rested in a velvet-padded box amongst a bevy of exhaustedly battered specimens, that one the first and only which caught his eye. The seal was carved on a nail-sized setting of lapis lazuli, bearing a water lily, heart-shaped leaves, tired yet beautiful. Not at all the sort of thing he'd wear. “You ever seen a water lily at night?” you had asked him, pushing a cheek against his shoulder to look. “They close right up.” You imitated a bud with your cupped hands, telling him they opened up again in the morning. Flowers that started anew each passing day. Rebirth. He thought there was a metaphor in there somewhere, and he was going to pocket the seal, but you gave him a sour look and he retaliated with another to mean you're not fun. You smiled, shrugged. Said it was a nice ring. He purchased it for five pieces of gold—which was five pieces too expensive, if you were to ask him.
Now the metal glints when Astarion dips his hand inwards. His thumbnail hooks under your underwear, nudges it aside, and with sunlight braided in his touch, he presses his fingerpad into you. Soft flesh, he'd kiss it if he had the time, eat you right up. He grins at your mixture of purr and sigh—devious, devious smile; it suits him tenderly.
“Shall I stop?” he ponders. There's malice to his voice, but even with that, you know he'd back away in an instant if you said so.
You shake your head no.
His finger parts you then, curious, seeking your arousal and the physical mark of it, gathering it until it seeps and clings all sweet and syrupy to his hand. He turns his palm up, precise as a cut, spreading middle and ring fingers to scissor your clit, and the signet he wears rocks into you like a drop of cool rain. You're grabbing your pillow in a fist now, biting down obscene words. His touch is a merciless flare; your hips snap, spine arched, writhing to meet his touch.
You kiss his hands often—before bed, checking them for cuts—you know them from the jutting bone of his wrist to the trimmed curve of his nails, you know where his calluses are set on his palm and which fingers he likes to use whenever he plays with you. He has two of them crooked inside you and he carves your pleasure like he's coring an apple, forcing you into an almost painful awareness of the placement of your guts and your sinews and the skin that wraps it all together, just so he can unravel the whole thing in one smooth swerve.
“Come back to bed,” you heave, desperate, hating yourself for how whiny you sound.
Astarion snickers. “Look at you, all bossy.”
He clutches your kneecap and capsizes you onto your back. The sheets curl and knot around your legs; you struggle to kick them off. He has to help you, disentangle you with claws, with hooks, as if to rip the whole thing apart. The sun drips on your belly and trickles down the veins of his forearms before he robs you of it for good. He covers you like a dark cloud and light crashes onto his shoulders, his knees planted between yours, his hair a crown of fire.
“You're not asleep anymore, are you?”
“No,” you buzz half-heartedly.
“What if I told you to get up and get dressed now?” he muses.
“Please don't do that,” you groan.
Astarion laughs. It's a delightful chime to wake up to, bouncy like the insides of a pomegranate, sweet and fun and sticking to the teeth. He laughs more now, you've noticed, a bit less in that scornful manner he used to ring as a soughing menace—he can be sweet, he can be acidic, so many flavors bundled up in one man. You go chase his laugh with your lips, some sleep-stunned, sloppy kiss, teeth clunking his, a little too much tongue. He doesn't mind it.
Something rises in him from deep, an abyssal current of desire, carried by bloodrush and the warm lick of lights and the wetness that's coating his fingers like he just crushed a pear. He palms your breast, your pulse, nips your nipple, all the while wondering what to do with that godsdamned flimsy gown that's still clinging to you tight enough to bother him (should he waste the time to strip you of it or simply rip it apart?).
You're dry humping him at this point, fingers clenching at his collar to steady yourself, the back of your thighs scrabbling his lap. He moans something you can't quite catch. You ask an unfocused what? to which he responds with his hand raking into your panties again. His knuckles warp and stretch the fabric while he rubs quick circles that drench his hand for good and make your teeth come down his lower lip. You're not asleep anymore, sure, but he's not thinking about walking you through the threshold of the room either.
Someone raps on the door. A voice beats through the ornate panels. Though you fail to decipher the words, impatience sluices them.
Astarion clamors, irritated, “I'm getting her dressed!”, even if the exact opposite is in fact happening.
Your fingers finish popping the buttons of his shirt and the material finally gapes over his skin, a revelation of clavicles, sturdy chest, the dip down to his navel. His body is gilt in light and the sight makes your mind trip. You're dying to put your tongue on inappropriate slabs and asperities, wet him all over just to see how the sun makes him glow.
You keep moaning his name and it's getting to his head, your body pulsating and compressed by the generous bark of sun, the mattress, him, as if fighting against getting pinned down, the struggle of an insect in a fountain. Between your thighs, you withhold what he craves.
“Hells with it,” he hisses.
His ring leaves a streak on your skin while he plies your panties off you, tossing them heedlessly to the foot of the bed. The sun is in your eyes, harsh, blazing. You shut them to make dark but your brain's still stunted by the blinding shard. He picks that moment to color your pussy the cherry red of his tongue and something shorts and sizzles in your brain. Deft fingers are coupled to the sacred swirl of his tongue, the low rumble of his voice piercing you from below; he kisses softly, then not so softly—so mean, actually—sucks all of you in his mouth and drops it, then waits for you to squirm before he does it again, with shattering intensity, tonguing your clit like it's a seed to nurture and nudge around in wet soil. You tremor like your body isn't yours anymore, made into something mellow with a pit and flesh and a stem all for him to split open and savor. Your shirt rides up, your tits bare; you play with the nipple he pinched before.
“Astarion,” you breathe, “Astarion, come on.”
There's a smack, wet and curt, a mouth noisily parting from a kiss.
“What is it, love?” he sighs, his voice raspy, like he just drank from a bottle of Amnian liquor and couldn't stop at the first glass.
“Come here,” you whisper, and when he does, you sample the tang of yourself on his lips.
You crash the heel of your hand on his clothed erection, up, down, bringing your fingers in a tight nest. All his brittle sense of duty cracks for good—he never had much of it in the first place.
“Gods, you little minx.”
He breaks away, stumbles up to rush what remains of clothing and decency off his lithesome shape.
“We'll never get out of this room on time,” he comments, falsely chagrined, like it'll piss someone off and he's giddy just imagining it.
“Hey,” you shift on your side to offer a reminder, “you started touching me.”
“Oh, I'd say the blame is very much collective.”
You're wriggling out of your sleeping attire, throwing it on top of the pants he's bunched on the carpet, singeing him with your stare, breathless. He catches your hands when you reach for him, slips into your arms with the ease of habit. Your leg is hooked around his waist. A shiver of joy simmers up your backbone from feeling him, naked and slotted against you.
“Wish I could put you in my mouth,” you confess in a low tone. The length of him is pressed hard against your pubic bone, denting your logic, his arousal smearing your skin. You glide a finger across his tip, up the sides of him, taut and lilac-veined.
“Hold that thought for tonight,” he murmurs.
His knuckles graze your chin, lugging your gaze back to him. He needs those eyes, most trusted of mirrors; needs them on him in fight, in leisure, in exploration, in life.
With a hitch of his hips and your hand as a rudder, he bends into you. It hurts like a needleprick, a quick pulse, pain yielding to complicated, thick pleasure, a slow rub that breaks your senses like twigs. You heave, flushed in strange places, uncertain if it's from the heat of the sun or the raw scrubbing of his cock. He curves up into a devious spiral that sweeps every sensitive spot in you, pelvis kissing your clit, so purposeful, the composition of this trick a complete mystery to you—you like it, that's all that matters; he knows it well enough to try every time. You're soaked between the thighs, his pelvis webbed slick too, and it's worsening with each drag, the crude light making everything so obvious, a messy evidence of attraction.
The gap between his mouth and yours is filled with slurred speech, phrases like you like that?, yes, a lot, and bleary nothings so candid and desperately turned on that it'd be hauntingly embarrassing to listen to in your normal state, the whole of this only making sense with your bodies tangled together, blabbering about harder, do that again, kiss me. After a while, it's daunting to speak at all, to be articulate. Excess light makes you dizzy, sluggish, stupid. The weight at your center, his unrelenting grip down the small of your back, the drip that's warm when he moves, the right kind of stretch, hilt deep, slowing you in your rocking pattern. You stop moving altogether. You let him do his thing, his hands all over you, the recurrent tempo of his hips.
He doesn't tell you stow your claws away, kitten, though he does think it when he's stung by the small marks you engrave on his ribs, his shoulders, whichever part of him you barnacle on.
Through the slit of your eyelids, you contemplate gold, ivory, pink, and touch is juxtaposed to sight in a messy spread of him, the perfect burn, the curve of his cupid's bow, his attention like a ray of flame, and next thing you can piece together is, you're falling apart around him, shaking on his cock like crystal on the verge of breaking, and he treats you like you're precious but not fragile, keeps that throb between your aching legs that makes your insides pleat and your mind hallucinate stars in broad daylight. He's not slowing down or halting and you think, good, you want him undone in your arms—no better way to start the day—Astarion spent and loved and safe and satiated.
There's another knock on the door. You sob against his carotid, still riding out the tail end of your orgasm, “Can't—fuck, just make them leave.” He's not in a much better state than you are. “Go away!” he exclaims balefully. He doesn't bother with a lie or an excuse, and you shouldn't laugh, but you do, bursting into some nervous hiccup that spreads to him.
“Great, now they know.”
“Oh, love, I think they knew well before that.”
He waits for the ripple of your muscles to recede into sore quiet, before he gingerly pushes on your shoulders, rolls you back so he's on top. Your legs are butterflied for better access and he's inside you again, dragging in and out, making him moan, shake his head, like he can't believe it's real, the feeling. It doesn't hurt at all, there's just pleasure now, the full, tight expanse of it, and the sounds wet, cloying. You think of orchards, blood orange pulp, ripe, bursting out of membranes.
The headboard thuds into the wall, once, twice, more. A lock of hair darts across his eye; you sit it back behind his ear for him. Vampires don't sweat but his skin is damp, you touch it on his nape, skittering to his chest. You asked him discreetly about it once. He called it condensation, like breath on glass. Now there's the heat of day darted on him and the steady quiver of pleasure, and it's a startling, eerie chemistry, because like this, his honey eyes, skin glistening, it'd almost feel like he's living.
He holds his thumb to your swollen clit, still hot from your release and whispers, “Sweet thing… My darling. How about seconds?”
“I don't know if I can,” you temper, shivering from overstimulation.
“Let it build. It's fine if you can't.”
You're struck by the tenderness in his voice.
“Astarion.”
“Mmh?”
“You're really something.”
There it is again, his pretty laugh, bubbling to your belly. You hold the sides of his neck to look at him, him in the sun, him making love to you, him with disarranged hair he'll whine about later because you tousled it, him with scratched shoulders and his clever mouth and the dangerous glitter in his pupils.
The room isn't silent. The city purrs, bashful, tippy toeing under the window. Smiths hammering scorched-red iron. Far off, the brackish backwash of the ebbing sea. A square of perfect blue encased in the sill.
Astarion, warm between your legs, melting you away. The headboard keeps a stuttering, unclear cadence, sometimes rough, sometimes muffled, like your lover isn't sure what he wants.
You trace his lips with your thumb and he kisses your fingertip. He'd like you to come a second time, and you know it, he wouldn't fuck you like that otherwise, with such focus, such care. And you worry a little because he does this sometimes, forgetting his own pleasure like it's inaccessible or something he isn't allowed to have. He already got you up the crest once. You don't mind the attention—far from it—but this is overkill.
You pick up his hand, set it on your hip. Eyes in his, framing his face, you rub under his ears, you whisper comfort and praise, “I love you, I love you, do I tell you that enough?” He asks, eyelids heavy, “Really, you do?”, and maybe he's jesting, maybe he's not, the intent's a little lost, but you go on anyway, all the things you like about him, things that make him him, not just that he's pretty, but witty and unruly and reckless, and you're not eloquent but that's why he listens, why he knows you're being truthful. The ball of your foot caresses his leg; you make him slow down. Feel you. Feel it. Take the time. His elbow digs the pillow for balance, you nudge at his fingers, tangle them with yours. The back of your hand presses into the soft casing and floats up the surface with each of his thrusts.
He's so close to toppling you can feel it beat in your core. Your voice breaks every few steps into your sentences, your thoughts begin to jumble—all his fault, truly; he rouses out slippery moans out of you. Your heart knocks with fury, prodding his breast bone.
“Come when you want,” you murmur. “Take all you like, I'm yours. Whatever you want, however you want it. All yours.”
His fingers tighten their grip. He makes a noise, feral, his mouth diving to yours. The weight of his tongue. The skip of his midriff against yours. Sweat, slick, water.
You don't even mean to but he really does make you come a second time. It catches you off guard, and you're gulping down, teary-eyed, your breath off-beat and turbulent.
And with the sun in his back, your body reaching heights against his, mute, undone, exquisitely clenching him, Astarion falls into ecstatic bliss too.
“They're not knocking anymore.”
You make that observation several minutes into the panting half-silence. He's softening against your inner thigh while your hand cuddles his back, smoothing the scars, counting the knuckles of his spine from top to bottom, then the other way up.
“They might send Lae'zel next.” Astarion grunts, nuzzling the curve of your neck one last time. “We better hurry if we want to keep the door on its hinges.”
A few seconds flutter by before he gathers the courage to tear away from your embrace. Your arms clutch your chest, emptied, disappointed. It's like stepping out of the sea in summer after playing in waves too long, and the air outside hitting sharp and brisk despite being warmer than the water. Astarion switches to look at you.
“Are we getting up now?”
“We're getting up.”
Your back cracks straight. You push your legs forth, roll your ankles, try to fit back into your body. You watch him fish his clothes off the floor and make a ruffled expression.
“You could just try bringing breakfast next time,” you tease.
Something hits you across the face.
“I don't like bread crumbs in bed.”
You realize he just hurled your underwear at you. You grimace, slip it back on, stare at your knees, trying to organize your thoughts. Wash up—that'll take a moment. Water, drink, your throat begs for it. And something to eat. What to wear.
Astarion takes pity on you, on that silly, lost fawn air you exude. He thinks it's stupid, how scattered some people are in the morning. How helpless you look. What would you do, if he weren't around? He strides over, leans in, offers his full mouth, a real tonic of a kiss, wet and sparkling. It makes you perk up like a sugar-rush.
“Clean up,” he says. “I'll pick your outfit.”
Outside the bedroom, somebody is banging on the door again.