how you call to me
GIF by @/cestpasfaux24601 / Dividers by @/saradika-graphics
↪︎ how you call to me directory
Summary: you were writing your thesis on men who couldn't say what they felt; he was, without meaning to, becoming your primary source
Pairing: Adam Dalgliesh x f!reader
Content warning(s): +18 MDNI, explicit sexual content, pinv sex, fingering, oral sex (f receiving), mutual pining, friends-to-lovers/slow burn payoff (we earned this shit), strong sexual tension, consent explicitly affirmed, aftercare, reader insert (no use of y/n), not beta'd (all my porn comes from the depths of my heart)
Chapter 7
He had said stay and you had said yes and neither of you had moved for a long moment, his forehead against yours, his hand still warm against your face, the poem on the table and the December dark at the window and the flat very quiet around you both.
Then he kissed you again.
This one was different from the first — less an arrival and more a declaration, longer and more certain, his hand sliding from your jaw into your hair. You turned toward him on the sofa, and his other hand found your waist and drew you across his lap with a deliberateness that was simply characteristic of him, one leg on either side of his body, nothing rushed, the same quality of complete and chosen attention applied now to this. To you. The focus of it was almost overwhelming.
You kissed him back with equal seriousness. His mouth was warm and unhurried and he made a quiet sound against you when you pressed closer, a sound that was mostly controlled and not entirely.
When you pulled back enough to breathe you were looking at the open collar of his shirt, the white fabric opening at his throat, and the decision was very simple. You pressed your lips to the side of his neck, just below the jaw, and felt him go still in the way he went still when something landed that he hadn't prepared for. His pulse was there, steady and slightly faster than usual, and you felt it against your mouth.
His hands tightened on your waist.
Not harshly — but with a new quality to them, a change in register from careful to something less managed. His fingers pressed into the fabric of your jumper and found the shape of you beneath it, and he turned his head and his mouth was against your temple, your hair, and the breath he exhaled was slow and deliberate in the way of someone exercising a restraint they could still, for the moment, maintain.
You kissed his neck again, lower, where the collar opened. His grip on your waist moved and his hands slid to the curve of your hips and then further, cupping your arse with a sureness that made you breathe in sharply against his skin. He held you there — not pulling, not demanding, simply the warm certainty of his hands learning the shape of you with that attentiveness he gave to everything — and then his fingers tightened, kneading you, and the sound you made was involuntary.
You leaned back and pulled your jumper over your head.
He looked at you.
The lamplight was warm and the room was cold at its edges and his eyes were as dark as the deep ocean. He looked the way a man looks when he has been practising composure for a long time and the practice has ceased to be available to him — not undone, not unravelling, but present in a way that required no management because there was nothing left to manage. The tiredness was still in his face and so was everything else: the attention, the intelligence, the feeling that had been accumulating in the margins of him for months, and all of it now directed at you without the usual careful mediation.
His hands moved to the latch of your bra at the back, found it without fumbling, and undid it.
He drew the straps from your shoulders slowly, following them with his hands, and when the fabric fell away his eyes moved over you with that complete and unhurried quality and he made a low sound in his chest — not performed, not deliberate, simply a sound that happened — and lowered his head.
His mouth on your breast was warm and precise and entirely focused. He used his tongue with the same attention he used for everything, learning what made you respond and returning to it without haste, and the cold air of the room against your skin sharpened the contrast of his warmth until you had one hand in his hair and were holding him there with a clarity of intent that surprised you somewhat.
You used your other hand on the buttons of his shirt.
There were four remaining — he'd had the top two undone since you arrived — and your fingers worked them with less patience than was perhaps dignified, and he lifted his head briefly and looked at you with something close to amusement and then returned his mouth to your breast and let you get on with it.
When the shirt was open you pushed it from his shoulders and put your hands on his chest.
He was lean in the way of someone whose body was incidental to his purposes, not constructed or tended but simply the physical fact of him — the long muscles of his chest, the warmth of his skin, the dark hair that crossed from breast to breast and narrowed to a line that disappeared into the waistband of his trousers. You traced it with your fingers and felt him exhale against your breast, felt the slight tension in his stomach muscles where your hand passed over them.
You moved your hand lower.
The fabric of his trousers was fine wool, soft under your palm, but what pressed against it was neither soft nor ambiguous. He made a sound against your breast that was entirely undisguised — the sound of someone abandoning a particular pretence — and you kept your palm there and felt him harden further under your touch, incrementally, unmistakably, and felt something move through your own body in direct response.
His mouth had stilled against you. His hands were on your hips and gripping, not gently.
You brought your lips to his ear. His hair was against your cheek and his breath was coming slightly unevenly and his whole body had the quality of something held just at the edge of its own containment.
"Let go," you said, "Adam."
For a fraction of a second nothing happened.
And then his hands moved to the backs of your thighs and he lifted you from the sofa in one movement, clean and certain, and you were against his chest with your legs around him and your arms around his shoulders and he was kissing you again — differently, now, with a depth that conceded what the last two months had not quite permitted either of you to say aloud. You kissed him back with equal fervour and his hands under your thighs were not careful at all.
He carried you as though it required no effort, which was in its own way tremendously distracting, and turned from the sitting room into the dark hallway, and through the second door.
The bedroom was dark except for the light coming through the open door behind you. He brought you to the edge of the bed and set you down on the mattress, and you looked up at him from it. He stepped back and shrugged the open shirt from his shoulders and dropped it, and reached for his belt with the unhurried efficiency of a man who had decided exactly what came next and was moving through it with purpose.
You looked at him.
The lamplight from the hallway caught the lines of him — the severity of his face resolved now into something else entirely, the composure burnt off or set aside, his eyes on you with a darkness and directness that you felt in several places simultaneously. He was beautiful in a way that was completely unselfconscious, the lean length of him, the particular quality of a man at absolute attention.
He came back to the bed and leaned over you and his hands found the waistband of your trousers, and here — here — the control made one final, brief reappearance and then gave way entirely: he pulled the fabric down with a fervour that bypassed careful entirely, a quick and frank impatience that you found more affecting than the deliberateness had been, because it meant the deliberateness had cost him something after all, and you were what he'd been holding it against.
Your underwear followed. And then his hands were on you — both of them, moving over your thighs, your hips, the plane of your stomach, with that attentiveness that was simply how he inhabited every action, and the cold air of the room was irrelevant because his hands were everywhere and warm.
One hand moved between your thighs and cupped you, and he went still when he found you wet with arousal. He looked at you. Something crossed his face — not surprise, something warmer than surprise, and more private.
He smiled.
It was not a common event, the smile, and this one was neither polished nor performed — it was the smile of someone in the presence of something they are genuinely glad of, simple and direct and brief. Then his fingers moved and the smile became irrelevant because two of them were inside you and his thumb was at your clit and the sound you made was thoroughly undignified and you found you had absolutely no concern about that.
He worked you with the same quality of focused intelligence he brought to everything. He watched your face and adjusted and returned to what made your breath catch, and he added his mouth — lowered his head between your thighs and used his tongue alongside his fingers, and the dual attention of it was almost more than you could accommodate. Your hands went to his hair. Your hips moved without your instruction.
The orgasm arrived like a long sentence reaching its final clause — everything that had been accumulating over two months and one evening and this dark bedroom, resolving at once into a shuddering, involuntary, complete release that you felt from your scalp to the soles of your feet, and you held his hair and said his name and he worked you through every moment of it without stopping.
After, you lay with your chest heaving and your hands loosening in his hair and he raised his head and looked at you.
He lifted his hand — the one that had been inside you — and held your gaze with absolute steadiness and put his fingers to his mouth. Slowly. The dark eyes on yours throughout, and the low hum he made in his chest was one of the more devastating things you had ever witnessed.
You reached for his trousers.
Your hands found the fly and undid it and he rose to his knees to help, pushing the fabric down and off, and his underwear followed, and he came back to you bare, kneeling above you, and you had a moment in which to see all of him clearly — lean and warm and entirely present — before your hand moved to his cock and closed around it.
He folded forward.
His forearms came down on either side of your head and his face was against your neck and he made a sound against your skin that was pulled from somewhere deep in him, rough and low and not controlled at all. You stroked him slowly, feeling the weight and warmth of him, and his hips moved fractionally, involuntarily, into your hand.
"If you—" he said, against your neck. His voice had changed. The precision was still there but the steadiness underneath it was gone. "If you continue — I will not—" He stopped. Pressed his mouth to your throat. "I won't last."
You kissed the side of his face in response, pressing a smile along with it. And gave him one last, slow, firm stroke.
He lifted his head and looked at you. His eyes were impossibly dark and his expression had that rawness you'd seen briefly in the sitting room, the layer of management absent, and underneath it: this. The full enormity of everything.
He positioned himself at your entrance and pushed forward slowly, watching your face throughout, and the feeling of him entering you — the stretch and warmth and fullness of it — made you exhale in a long, trembling breath that you hadn't known you'd been holding.
He stopped when he was fully inside you. His eyes were on yours.
"Look at me, love," he said. Quietly, with complete seriousness.
The word arrived simply. Not performed. Not announced. The most natural word in the world in his voice at this moment, and more affecting for that than anything elaborate would have been.
You looked at him.
He began to move.
Slow at first — deeply, deliberately, each movement chosen with the same care as everything else, drawing back and returning with a thoroughness that made you understand what he'd meant about compression, about the form that made something both possible and impossible simultaneously. Your hands were on his shoulders and the pleasure of it was building with the same accumulative quality as everything between you had built: gradually, specifically, with the sense of something enormous being approached by increments.
You moaned.
His rhythm faltered slightly at the sound. Recovered. You moaned again, because the angle of him was extraordinary and you had ceased to have any reason to be quiet about it, and this time the recovery took longer.
Your nails found his back.
Not deliberately — your hands had moved there without instruction and the pleasure was making thought somewhat approximate, and when he thrust particularly deeply your fingers contracted and drew lines across his skin and he groaned — a real groan, pulled from the chest, ungoverned — and whatever barrier had been holding him at the slow and deliberate pace came apart entirely.
He started fucking you in earnest.
The change was complete and immediate — the same man, the same hands, the same attention, but the restraint gone as though it had never existed, replaced by something that was all forward motion and depth and the unmediated fact of how much he wanted you. The headboard. The movement of the mattress. The sounds he made against your neck. You held on and moved with him and the pleasure was overwhelming and specific and built rapidly toward a second peak.
His back under your hands was warm and the muscles of it shifted with each movement and you felt the marks your nails had left and pressed them again, deliberately this time, and he made a sound against your ear that was both pain and its opposite.
After some time — you had genuinely lost track — he lifted his head. His face was flushed and his breath was entirely uneven and he looked like a man who was approaching the end of what was available to him.
"Do you—" he began. The sentence collapsed before it finished, his hips moving into you again and his eyes briefly losing focus. He tried again. "Should I—"
You moved your hand to the round of his arse and pressed his hips to yours, firmly and without ambiguity.
He looked at you. Understood completely.
He dropped his forehead to yours and his rhythm shortened and deepened and you felt him shudder — once, and then again — and the groan he made when he came was long and low and entirely unguarded, and he buried himself inside you and held there, his hands gripping you, his whole body a single sustained tremor of release.
You held him through it. Your arms around his back, your face against his neck, his weight on you warm and complete.
After, he didn't move immediately. He remained where he was, above you and half beside you, his face against your hair, his breathing slowly returning to something normal. His hand found your hip and stayed there, warm and still.
When he lifted himself away he did it carefully, disposing of practicalities without making a matter of them, and returned to you immediately — settled beside you and drew the blanket up over you both, and then lay still for a moment.
Then he turned on his side to face you.
He looked at you for a moment in the dim light, his expression quiet and serious and more open than you had ever seen it — not fragile, not uncertain, but open in the way that is only possible after the kind of exposure neither of you had been in any hurry to risk.
His hand came to your face. The same gesture as earlier in the evening, palm to jaw, but slower now. His thumb traced your cheekbone and the line of your brow and the corner of your mouth, attentively, without destination.
"Are you all right?" he asked almost in a whisper.
"Yes." You turned your face slightly into his hand. "Are you?"
He considered this with characteristic seriousness. "I'm not certain all right covers it," he murmured jokingly. "But yes."
You lay together in the quiet, his hands tracing vague, soft patterns across your skin while you hummed in pleasure from the contact. The December night pressed at the window and the flat held its warmth around you, and the lamp in the hallway threw its light through the open door, soft and indirect.
After a while he rose — quietly, without waking you, though you were not asleep — and came back with a glass of water for each of you. He sat on the edge of the bed and handed you the glass and waited while you drank, and then took it back and set both glasses on the bedside table.
He lay back down beside you.
"The spare blanket is in the wardrobe," he said. "If you're cold in the night."
In the night. Not if you stay. Simply an assumption, offered without pressure and without doubt, and you felt the carefulness of it — the way he had constructed the sentence to give you everything without asking for anything.
"Thank you," you said.
His arm came around you and you settled against him, your back to his chest, and his breath was slow and warm at the back of your neck. His hand lay flat against your sternum, relaxed and still, and after a moment you put your hand over it.
The same gesture as in the sitting room a week ago — your hand over his, quiet and voluntary — but the country it described was entirely different now.
He pressed his lips to the back of your head. Once, brief, sincere.
Outside, the dark continued its long work over the city, over the lamp-lit streets and the Kensington terrace and the third-floor flat where two people lay in the particular silence of those who have crossed a significant distance and arrived somewhere neither of them had quite admitted they were going.
On the table in the sitting room, the poem lay open, its last stanza facing upward.
Where your name sits, and will not be revised.
It was, you thought — half-asleep against the warmth of him, his hand under yours, his breathing evening into something like rest — entirely accurate.
A.N.: after all those chapters, i think we kinda deserved this one, huh? Bad news, next is the last chapter (apart from the epilogue). Good news, i have taken such liking to this story that i am starting to draft some spare continuations. Would you like to read those when the time comes?
Dalgliesh taglist: @harubonchari @baelorenthusiast @probablydeadbynowdotcom @caffeinatedwoman @thorins-queen-of-erebor @sgmwester @ms0anthrop
If you want to get tagged in this series, leave a comment!
All praise to @ildico-the-golden, beautifully done.
