#an egg writes

[eggletine]

[ghosts: Juli]

November nights. A single lit lantern in the greenhouse, an empty glass at your elbow, plants around your feet. Your jacket hangs around you like a vice. There’s dirt in the air, dirt on your hands, dirt on his cuff but he doesn’t notice.There’s a single crease between his brow. It deepens when you grin.

The plants whisper when you kiss him. He tastes of bitter coffee and sea salt wind. Somewhere there’s rap playing. A motorcycle growls past on the street. He pushes aside his papers. Chases your lips. Your palms. Your hips. Your hands fill with his shoulders. His fingers curl around your thighs. The world around you is burning. The wind swallows your sighs.

[eggletine]

James Reinald: A Character Study

Egg’s Drabble Babble: What was an exercise in description turned into a somewhat wistful portrait of James years down the road. 

James Reinald is forty, and he looks it. Not just that, he feels it.

He tilts his head underneath the bathroom light, scowling darkly at his graying temples. Julibee tells him that it makes him look dignified, but he just feels...old. He takes stock of his face: slowly receding hairline, thick brows drawn low over his eyes, stern jaw complete with a 5 o’clock shadow.

He’s not a big man; working with a man like Bossa would make anyone reconsider the very concept, and James doesn’t come close to comparing. But his frame is solid and his torso still somewhat tapers into his waist, even if his middle has gotten thicker over the years. It’s not the lithe stature of his youth, he knows this - time and too many take-out boxes during stakeouts had seen to that. He has more scars, more aches, and pains in his joints in the morning, and when the weather is bad, he can feel almost every old injury he’d suffered. He knows he’s not that old yet, but the life of an enforcer, of a Reinald, is not an easy one. Loathe as he was to admit it, it was hard to ignore that it was beginning to take its toll.

Still, there’s some sharpness to James, a dark intensity in his eyes that time hadn’t burned away. He’s still broad around the shoulders and appreciatively muscled too, which is something. Hell, he’s in better shape than some of the new recruits, which is something that he’d need to see to in the next couple of weeks.  

He hears the bathroom door creak open then shut, but makes no motion to acknowledge it until Julibee wraps her arms around him.

“You’re scowling, Jamie.” she mumbles into his back, voice heavy with sleep.

“And you should be sleeping.” he huffs a soft laugh and turns, lacing his hands comfortably around her hips.

She only grumbles incoherently in response and nuzzles a kiss into the hollow of his neck. She’s stolen his shirt again, a habit he’d come to accept early. Not that he minded in the slightest - it looked good on her, and it made her happy. Affection curls warm in his chest, and he buries his face in her tangled hair. She smells of vanilla and lavender and, he notes with a proud smirk, his cologne.

They stay like that for a while, quiet and comfortable, until he nudges them both back to bed and underneath warm covers.

[eggletine]

Prompt by @the-modern-typewriter : It is a terrible thing to want happiness but not know what to do with peace, because we were raised on war and I learnt to love you fighting. But you love gently, arms laid down, and that is not the version of you I fell in love with.

But I learned.

When I first met you, you snarled at me from the shadows. You were dark eyes and thorned words wrapped in shattered glass and steel cords. Blood poured down from your nose and from the knives clutched in your bruised hands. Yet like a moth pulled towards the flame, I was drawn to the defiance poured into every line of you. And, somehow, irrevocably, you were drawn to me too.

You taught me what it was like to be rain after a storm - lying wanting and exhausted in a puddle at your feet.

We stole hellfire kisses in trenches and ruined streets, amid choking smoke. I learned how to sear want into your skin with my mouth. How to feed hunger into your eyes, and bite at it from between your thighs. When your touch lanced lightning through my body, I kissed the thunder from your lips and learned how to make love to a storm.

We may not have been made of blood and fire, but fire and blood made us. So when the dust settled, when there were no bodies left but ours, you caught my gaze from across the battlefield and I despaired. Because how could flames stay alive with no fuel nor oxygen?

But you knew how to simmer instead of burn.

You dripped honey instead of poison from your lips for me and traded your serrated blades for cautious fingertips that made me ache for more. You branded kisses into my skin, bit at the hunger on my lips, and on rainy nights we were a hurricane. You held, never gripped. Asked, never expected. You gave, and gave, and gave, and gave, and slowly I remembered how to give in return.

I knew the weight and breadth of your voice so I learned how to listen to the silence and the noise between. I learned how to guide air back into your lungs with kisses on the nights the ghosts sucked the wind out of your lungs. I knew how to catch your hand when your fingers sought mine, and on rare occasions when my heart was light, I returned your smile just to watch yours grow brighter.

Slowly but surely, I learned how to love you in the aftermath, when the war left your knives and my fists but lingered in our eyes. We were not meant for peace, my love, but we learned to manage the quiet.