Divination of skin and pulse
โ"When my time comes around โ lay me gently in the cold dark earth โ no grave can hold my body down I'll crawl home to her" - work song, hozier
[oh he looks majestic in these oh my god]
A/N: hiii! so this is a little... terrifying because i genuinely donโt write things like this. i usually live in the trenches of angst, yearning, emotional ruin, etc etc but this time i wanted to try something softer. lighter. (i'm so full of angst pls someone pull me out of the trenches)
i'm still not sure if this fully escaped the angst allegations because apparently i canโt help myself, but this is definitely me stepping outside of my comfort zone and into unfamiliar territory. hell this isn't even that intense but hey! i'd love to venture out... and go beyond AHAHAHA beyond as in.. beyond.
anyway, i hope you enjoy this!! i took a break from chiaroscuro hihi, will be back soonest!! ๐
Not sharp, not anything with edges โ just warmth, all over, the kind that had built itself into the sheets and my skin and the air over the last however long and settled there like it had always lived there.
My body came back to me slowly, the way it did in these moments, piece by piece, like something reassembling itself after being taken apart.
My limbs first โ heavy, that good heavy, the kind that meant everything in them had been thoroughly used and was now done.
Then my heartbeat, still moving faster than usual, still making its way down from wherever it had been โ I could feel it in my throat, behind my ears, in the tips of my fingers.
Then the room. the ceiling, the plaster of it, the water stain in the corner I'd never cared about. The lamp on the nightstand throwing its amber everywhere, that warm honeyed light that made the walls look like the inside of something safe, something closed off from the rest of the world.
The balcony door, cracked open, the curtain doing its slow unconscious thing โ in, out, in, out. The city beyond it, dark and low and quiet in the way it only got past three in the morning, when even the noise had given up.
My hair was a disaster across the pillow and I was distantly aware of this and completely unbothered. There was a pleasant static behind my eyes, not pain, just the afterglow of a nervous system that had been thoroughly occupied and was now winding itself down through the lowest possible gear. I lay still and breathed and let myself be exactly where I was โ horizontal, heavy, unhurried, the lamp making everything amber and soft โ and thought nothing.
It was one of the rare times my mind actually went quiet. He had a way of doing that.
Taking me somewhere past the noise and leaving me there, wrung out and still, like a bell after it's been rung.
I felt the shift of weight before I saw him โ the specific displacement of the duvet, the change in the air โ and then he was coming up, slowly, pushing the covers back and emerging into the lamplight.
His hair was completely undone, dark and falling across his forehead at angles it had no business being at, and he pushed it back with one hand in a gesture so absent and unguarded that it did something to me immediately, lodged itself somewhere in my chest without asking.
He was still coming back to himself too โ I could see it, the way he blinked once in the amber light, the way he was finding the room again, finding the hour, finding me. His eyes settled on my face and stayed there.
The giggle came out before I had any say in it. Small and involuntary and a little breathless, surprised out of me by the specific sight of him โ by his wrecked hair and the particular way he was looking at me, half-gathered, entirely himself.
I pressed my lips together after but it was already out. Something happened at the corner of his mouth.
And then he smiled. Actually smiled โ not the almost-smile I knew, not the small controlled curve he allowed himself when something caught him off guard, but a real one, quiet and brief and entirely unguarded, the kind that moved further up his face than he usually permitted.
It was gone in a few seconds. It always was. But I saw it and I kept it, the way I kept all of them, filed somewhere I didn't examine too often because examining it had a tendency to undo me.
He didn't sit back. He stayed close โ propped up but close, his face near mine, his eyes still on me, and I reached up and he let me.
My fingers went to his hair first, pushing through it, feeling the specific softness of it, the weight of it falling between my fingers as I moved through it slowly. He exhaled. He leaned into it โ barely, just slightly, just enough that I felt it, his head following my hand with the smallest motion, like he hadn't decided to do it. Like his body had made that decision without consulting him.
I moved to his forehead. Traced the line of it, the furrow between his brows that never fully left โ some permanent impression of centuries of thinking, pressed into the muscle and staying. I smoothed it with my thumb.
His temple next, the thin skin there, and then his cheekbone, and here I slowed down because the lamp was doing extraordinary things to the angle of it, the light carving his face into something architectural, something from another era, which was accurate, which was something I tried not to think about too directly because it opened into things I couldn't afford at four in the morning.
His jaw โ the line of it, sharp in the light, the curve where it met his ear. I took my time with all of it. My fingers were memorizing. I'd accepted this about myself by now.
I kissed his forehead. Felt the cool of his skin against my lips โ not cold, just his temperature, the specific degree of him. His cheekbone, slow. The corner of his eye, barely anything. His temple. He was very still through all of it, that held stillness, and I moved to his jaw and pressed my lips there and felt him exhale again, longer this time, through his nose.
His nose. I kissed the bridge of it. He blinked.
The corner of his mouth โ not his mouth, just the corner, just beside it โ and I felt something in him change, a slight shift in his breathing, a quality of attention that sharpened. His mouth was right there. I was right there.
I looked at him for just a second โ his face, his eyes, the full attention of him sitting right there waiting โ and I smiled, small and private and completely deliberate, and I turned over.
I settled onto my side facing the balcony, pulled the covers up to my shoulder, and looked at the curtain and felt the smile sit in my chest like something warm and mine.The silence behind me had a very specific texture.
I said nothing. The curtain moved.
"I was tired," I said. "I needed to sleep."
"You are not sleeping. You're smiling. I can tell from here."
I pressed my lips together. Outside, a window across the way had a light on. Someone else awake at this hour. I gave them three seconds of my attention.
"No fair," he said, and then before I could respond โ before I could fully appreciate the fact that Armand had just said "no fair", like a person, like someone sulking, which he absolutely was โ his arm came around my waist and pulled.
Not gentle about it, not rough about it, just immediate, just closing every possible inch between us in one motion, hauling me back against him with a kind of purposefulness that made me laugh again, surprised out of me.
He pressed his face into my neck. I felt him smile there, against my skin. He was smiling. I could feel it.
"You're sulking," I said.
"Oh, you absolutely are."
"I'm expressing dissatisfaction," he said, into my neck, "with the situation."
His arm tightened at my waist and pulled me further in, and I felt the full press of him against my back โ his chest, his legs finding mine beneath the covers, tangling with them, one of his legs sliding over both of mine and staying there, the weight of it, pinning gently. His other hand came to my hip.
He was everywhere. He had made himself everywhere, stitched himself to me without ceremony, and the warmth of it โ even with his natural cool, even with the specific temperature of his skin โ was total. There was no space between us. I didn't think he intended there to be.
"Better," he said, to no one.
"You're unbelievable," I said, meaning it as a complaint, not managing it at all.
"You left me there," he said. Still muffled in my neck. Still completely serious. "Deliberately."
"I have no idea what you're talking about."
He pressed a kiss to the back of my neck. Then another one, higher. Then the side, slow, working up toward my jaw โ unhurried, making his point without making it, which was how he made all his points. His leg stayed over mine. His hand at my hip pressed slightly, pulling me back into him as if there were still somehow space to close, which there wasn't. He found more anyway.
I looked at the city. The light in the building across the way. The curtain, in and out. My body, heavy and warm and completely held.
"You can let go a little."
"No," he said simply, and kissed my neck again, just below my ear, slow and deliberate, and I laughed quietly and stopped arguing because there was no argument here, really. There was just him, behind me, his leg over mine and his arm around my waist and his face pressed to my neck and his hand at my hip keeping me close, and the amber lamp making the room feel like somewhere time didn't apply, and the curtain moving in and out in the dark.
He stayed like that for a while. His lips moved against my neck without kissing โ just resting, sometimes pressing the faintest thing, sometimes just warm and still. His thumb moved at my hip, slow and aimless. I put my hand over his at my waist the way I always did and felt his fingers shift immediately to find mine, lace through them without looking, without needing to look.
Then his lips pressed, more deliberately, to the side of my neck. Not a kiss exactly โ more like he was placing something there. And then I felt it. His lips parting slightly against my skin, right over the pulse, and pressing there. Holding. His mouth directly over the heartbeat, feeling it through the skin of my throat, and he went completely still, both of us, like the room had taken a breath and forgotten to release it.
I felt my own pulse come back to me through his mouth. Strange and intimate, this loop โ my heartbeat, and then him feeling it, and me feeling him feeling it. His lips stayed. He didn't move. He was counting, or not counting, just receiving โ taking in the rhythm of it the way you take in a sound you've been waiting to hear. Beat, beat, beat. Reliable. Ongoing. Mine.
I thought about what it cost him to need this. What it said about all the rhythms he'd felt go quiet over the centuries, under his hands, beneath his mouth, how many he'd felt stop. I didn't let myself go too far into that. But I thought about it, just at the edge, just enough to understand the weight of his stillness.
"Still going," I said, soft.
He exhaled against my neck. His arm tightened around me.
He kissed the pulse point then โ actually kissed it, lips pressing and holding, longer than the others, something serious in it, something that had nothing to do with want and everything to do with something else entirely. I closed my eyes. His leg shifted over mine, heavier somehow, more deliberate, like he was reminding himself and me both that I was here and he was here and the distance between those two things was nothing, was negligible, was something he had personally eliminated.
His hand found mine under the blanket and held it properly this time โ not two fingers, not the light resting touch, but his whole hand closed around mine, warm-adjacent, his thumb pressed into my palm.
"Don't go anywhere," he said. Quiet. Almost to himself.
"I'm not going anywhere," I said. "I'm in my own bed."
There was something in the second one that was different from the first. I didn't ask about it. I just held his hand and felt his mouth still at the side of my neck, the occasional small press of it, unhurried, like he was just โ keeping contact. Maintaining something. His leg draped over mine, heavy and grounding. His chest against my back. His breath when he took it, slow and deliberate, drawn in through my hair.
The lamp held its amber. The curtain moved. The city outside was dark and patient and doing nothing we needed to pay attention to. I lay there in the total fact of him and felt my heartbeat slowing down, degree by degree, the static behind my eyes going gentler, my hand held in his, his mouth at my neck.
His lips pressed once more to the side of my throat โ soft, barely anything, barely a kiss at all, just contact, just the reminder of it โ and his thumb moved in my palm, slow.
"Sleep," he said. Not a command. Not even a request. Just an offering, something placed gently into the space between us.
I stopped fighting the weight behind my eyes.
I went slowly, the way sleep actually came in moments like these โ not sudden, not a drop, but a gradual dissolving, the edges of the room going softer and softer until they were gone. His hand in mine. His mouth against my neck. His leg over mine, keeping me exactly here, keeping me exactly his.
i saw a vision and it would not leave me alone until i wrote it down. i wish creation was always this simple AURURHHRRH โ a thought haunting you long enough that eventually you surrender to it. god, i love you chiaro.
i soo love the idea of armand checking readerโs pulse every chance he gets. fingers against a wrist, against a throat, like he needs proof. like the warmth and the beating beneath his hands are evidence that this is real and not something he imagined out of loneliness :((
and kissing the pulse on their neckโฆ.. oh that makes me feel violently unwell actually
