[tug] - to pull my museās head back by the hair
The parlour was dark save for the amber tremble of the hearth, casting flickering light across walls where oil portraits and framed pictures presided. Men of valour and sorrow stared out from their painted eyes. In an antique frame, from within the confines of a time-bleached photograph, Boromir grinned in all the sunlight of boyhood, Faramir standing solemn in the shade beside him.
Rain whispered ceaselessly at the windows, a soft percussion like the tapping of a thousand ghostly fingertips, as though the world outside had thinned to a dream, and only this room ā this moment ā remained real.
CelebrĆan straddled his lap, her knees sinking into the studded sofa, her hair silken against his throat, her body warm and perilously light. Her dress, once modest as a veil of moonlight, had slipped from her shoulders, baring skin nacreous and pale, kissed now and again by the gold of the firelight. Faramir had been tentative at first ā lips landing in wordless questions over her collarbone, her shoulder, the tundra of her dĆ©colletage, the soft peaks of her still-tethered breasts. Hunger had unspooled slowly, inexorably, a silken thread pulled by her hands. He kissed her until his breath grew ragged.
When her fingers curled in his copper hair ā slender and decisive, all weightless command ā he did not resist. His breath caught, his body obeyed. CelebrĆan drew his head upward, and he went with her.
Faramir looked at CelebrĆan then, his breath low and uneven, her taste still warm on his kiss-tender lips, and let her see his ruin in return. Cheeks were flushed, his grey eyes were wide and storm-dark. When he be spoke, his voice was roughened by desire and the unbearable delicacy with which he held her.
āIs it too much?ā he asked, as one might ask the sea whether it meant to drown him.
By which he meant: Was he too much?
Hands cupped her hips gently, rising so his thumbs could stroke the spokes of her ribs, rejoicing as they flared with each inward breath. Faramir had offered her everything without saying a word. Not just his body, but his sanctuary, his surrender. From her, he would take nothing. He would only receive ā only if she willed it.