#mimozka

The moments afterwards were what Cullen liked best. Even more than the pleasure of connection – of movement – came that of muscles well-used, the heaviness in the limbs, the hum of warmth as the aftershocks faded away, made all the better by Maighread’s weight relaxed against him. Her skin lay smooth against the idle stroke of his thumb as their breaths evened out together, as their heartbeats calmed. He allowed himself a small smile as she sighed and wriggled a little to get more comfortable, not needing to look to know the way she fit against him.

If he strained his ears, he could just make out the noise of the party still going on below them, echoes of celebration and relief magnified by the architecture of Skyhold’s great hall and then channelled up the hollow interior of the Inquisitor’s tower, but he let the awareness of it slip from his mind. The crack of the fire in the hearth and the sigh of wind around the walls grounded him. He savoured it. For so long he had wanted nothing else, and now, finally, the danger was over, they had a moment to breathe, and they could do so together.

Maighread shifted again with a crinkle of fine cotton sheets, her fingers gentle combing through the hair on his chest. “So you did miss me then?”

He opened his eyes. She gazed back steadily, the fire in her irises bled to the edges in the low light of the room, the play of the smirk across her lips drawing the breath from his lungs as certainly as a blow from a shield. She allowed such vulnerability with few others, and it stoked something fierce in his heart to know she shared it with him. As he licked his lips to reply, his hand rose higher so he could brush the sweat-damp strands of her hair back from her face.

“I’m glad you survived,” he told her.

She grinned, leaning into the touch. “Are you?”

Their first words, spoken so long ago, but so different now with repetition, with so much more behind them. Then, he had ground them out with clipped practicality through a headache and a week of battle fatigue, and she had responded in kind, her chin lifted in challenge, tense like a cornered animal. Now he read delight in the tilt of her head, the spark of her desire in the way her gaze flicked over his features – as if they hadn’t already made love – and he smiled at the teasing. He would have laughed in that first year-ago meeting if someone had told him that a half-wild mage would become the dearest thing to him in the world.

He reached for her as she stretched forwards, snaring her within the circle of his arms to bring her close enough to flutter kisses over every part of her face. She laughed, her fingers wound into his hair, and in her squirming to escape the scratch of stubble on his cheeks they rolled across the bed until he had her pinned, his heart close to bursting at their closeness.

“My darling,” he murmured, brushing reverent fingers along her jaw, “I couldn’t tell you the half of it.”