#queenofsunspear

I.

He teaches her French. Or attempts to at any rate. The sound of her raspy voice trying to wrap itself around the sweet endearments never allowing a lesson to last more than five minutes before they end up sprawled and tangled on his bed.

II.

She brings him all the Ace Ventura movies when he’s feeling under the weather and they laugh so hard at all the same parts until she’s forced to make him some tea for his throat. He drinks every drop and she thinks—with not a small amount of satisfaction— that she must be getting better at making it to his exacting British standards. Either that, or he’s just too polite to say anything. She kisses him in case it’s the latter (probably a little dirtier than one should when the other’s kind of ill), later justifying it with the reasoning that you’re supposed to sweat out a fever.

[He brings her Dumb & Dumber the next week.]

III.

She wrangles him into going to an honest-to-god rodeo when they visit her family in Texas, utterly charming her parents and easily keeping up with her brothers’ relentless hazing with that stupid perfect grin. They bring him to a stereotypical southern bar, complete with horseshoes on the walls and a giant mechanical bull, just for the sake of giving him a ‘fully immersive’ Texan experience. Before she’s back to the table with the second round, though, she sees that they’ve somehow managed to coax him into trying out the damn thing, and she pushes through the crowd feeling equal parts amused and alarmed. Her concern’s obviously misplaced though when he breezes past the current record of three minutes and twenty-one seconds, his lithe body moving with the jerky motions as if he were saddle-born. He lands gracefully on the mat to a roar of cheers when it gets to over five minutes, and she suspects he did it on purpose to spare the regulars’ pride—a precious commodity in these parts. When he makes his way back to her, he’s a little out of breath, his face flushed and eyes alight with mischief. It’s all she can do to stop herself from pouncing on him in that moment.

She does it later among her various sports trophies in her old bedroom, fucking him with ruthless efficiency until he’s visibly shaking from the effort to keep quiet.

IV.

He introduces her to his sisters at the opening night of his youngest’s new play, and they both give him obnoxiously knowing smiles all throughout the afterparty later that night whenever Jaimie’s not looking. He narrows his eyes at them warningly while simultaneously feeling as if an indescribable weight has been eased from his chest since they arrived.

He’s dismissed with cheerful expedience the next morning when they come to abduct Jaimie for some kind of shopping slash girly initiation ritual, and he mentally takes stock of all the most embarrassing stories they’re most likely filling her head with instead of reading the pile of scripts his agent’s been hounding him about. When she gets back and regales him of what a wonderful time she had, he slowly [read: foolishly] lets himself believe he’s dodged a bullet this time. That is, until he mentions that he didn’t get much done today and she asks innocently if he’d feel more productive if she set up an audience of stuffed animals for him to practice his lines on. He buries his face in his hands with a humiliated groan and mentally curses the plague that is having sisters. She’s laughing so much that she doesn’t immediately register the way his eyes alight on her with wicked intent. By the time she does, it’s too late—he’s already pinning her to the kitchen counter, doing his best to wipe the smirk off her face.

She enjoys letting him try for a long time before finally caving.

V.

They attend the opera in Prague, both enjoying the anonymity of blending into the glittering crowd of well-dressed patrons. When they reach their seats and the curtain goes up, he finds himself watching her more than the players on the stage, completely engrossed in her reactions to the action below. The way she eagerly leans forward on the balustrade, as if she wished to be closer; the way her entire torso convulses when she laughs as if her body can’t physically contain all the amusement bubbling up. He quickly loses all track of where the story’s at, but assumes it’s approaching the end when he sees her brow furrow, her expression filled with such sweet gravity at the tragedy unfolding before them. A single tear rolls down her cheek, and suddenly his mother’s voice is in his head, dispensing advice given when he was just a boy: Find a girl who cries at the opera, Tom. That tells you all you need to know. He abruptly leans forward and takes her left hand in his. She glances back at him with a quizzical smile, but it slowly fades when she sees the intense look in his eyes. Her lashes flutter nervously as she looks down and away, but her hand squeezes his, and he knows that she understands.

They crash into the hotel room in a tangle of limbs and desperate kisses after a quiet ride back fraught with barely restrained tension, both supremely aware of the driver’s lack of tinted partition. Tom more than makes up for lost time as he simultaneously kisses her and flings his jacket and tie haphazardly over the nearest chair. Once she’s helped him get his shirt off, though, he suddenly gentles and slowly sets out to trace the tight seams of her dress all across her body. She tries to remain still as he starts to whisper all manner of things against every inch of skin he exposes while gradually peeling off her dress, but when he begins switching intermittently to French when he finds out that English words fail to convey his meaning properly, she’s a goner.

Later, when they’re recovering in bed and he’s playing idly with a strand of her hair between his fingers, she presses her forehead to his and swallows thickly. She tells him she’s not good with words like him— not nearly as articulate. But when her fingers run over his chest, he wants to tell her just how wrong she is. Because what is poetry if not the way he arches automatically into the feel of her nails scraping gently down his torso? What use is being fluent in the biology and mechanics of sex when she breathes hotly into his ear like that? And how can he ever hope to explain in words the way his mind promptly empties of any knowledge of anyone before her when she moves up to straddle him? The gut-wrenching realization that nothing in his life seems to hold any significance compared to the feel of her body against his is as frightening as it is breathtaking.

It’s a conundrum he’d be happy to spend the rest of his life figuring out.

NOTES: 

okay okay explanation: so like, this is kind of what my rough drafts for fics usually look like in my notebook? it's practically not!fic style, which is why it's in present tense and oh god i suck so bad at it i knowwww, the style is all over the place, but all these little headcanons were  piling up and coming to nothing, so i wanted to dust them off a bit and share it with you before they got lost for good. lol. but yes, cry with me. i honestly cannot be left alone with thisssssssss