sleep ,
List of drabble prompts (x)
Sleep: My character needs to stay at your character’s house for the night, or vise versa.
rin is doing morning stretches again. jei watches patiently as he gets ready to leave, watches and can't help but stare at acres of lean muscle and warm skin, sweat in the dip of his scar-marked spine. when he bends over, the back of his neck beckons.
she takes a sip of her tea and thinks about religion.
rin runs with scissors, so to speak, frequently and enthusiastically. jei walks with scissor guards in her pocket. rin tells her stories of the world and she listens with the reservations of someone who's seen how terrible it can be, listens this boy with midnight fur and noontime smile and wonders what it is about him that lets him be so enthusiastic all the time.
she wonders how he can keep smiling when his arm has a lattice-patterned bruise, and she wonders if he thinks she can't see the way his expression shifts and changes into something much more solemn.
"can i stay with you?" he asks, unsurprisingly so, as he's sitting on her couch with a book in one hand and a cup of coffee in another. he won't meet her eyes, but she's perceptive enough to know that there's a reason for it. her mouth opens to say no but that is when he decides to look up and smile and suddenly it feels like nine in the afternoon. "i mean, if it's no trouble! i just...got held up, and missed the bus, and i'm not really keen on...er...travelling at this time of the night."
there's an implication, there, and although jei does not know the intricacies of a world she has come to shy away from, he doesn't want him to leave. she sits beside him, and smiles -- his expression is infectious, and the virus eats away at whatever worries have been nagging at the back of her head. jei's not going to ask if he doesn't want to tell; it's always been that way. "yeah. it's fine."
and she lets him stay because she wants him to. wants him even when he's quiet and studious, wants the soft contemplative hums he's probably not aware he vocalises, wants the way he rolls his sleeves up while he does his notes and down when he takes a sip of his coffee.
she misses the way he looks up at her, too, before his eyes quickly return to the pages of his book and his hands are steadily typing notes again.
—
after a few weeks the universe decides to once again increase rin's negative sex drive to the billions. it feels like he's been drugged and he doesn't know why jei is the first person he seeks.
rin finds himself alone with her and takes his time to memorise jei's body, its precious tells. he learns how to get jei whimper, make those desperate noises in his ear, what has her knees shaking, her thighs buckling, toes curling.
before this, rin has been a reservoir of want. the universe only just decided to get him to act on it, on the waves that lap at his throat every time they sit on the same couch, every time she throws clothes at his face and he laughs and ignores the fact that he wants hers on the floor, too.
there's a lot more to try, still.he doesn't blame the universe much for it; he's always been the curious one, after all.
she becomes a mess. rin's shirt is creased from her fingers digging into it, from when they'd kissed against her bedroom door. she looks so good, and rin just wants.
rin doesn't hide this from her, hide that he wants her, body and soul and heart and everything else that he can take. he's a greedy little monster like that. his voice is so level, so sure, that his vision blurs with the heat. his heart ricochets inside its confines as if it's doing a hundred-meter sprint while high on red bull and a fuck-ton of sugar. he hears hers do the same.
—
jei has legs that go on for miles and a mouth soft and pliant as a peach. the latter, rin shouldn't know about, but he does anyway. he's content with keeping the information to himself.
things, he thinks, don't change much. he still comes over at every opportunity and she becomes a gracious host, except -- studying almost always ends up in feverish kisses and sweet kisses and every kind of physical contact he can glean from the time he's spending with her. the problem, rin realises, lies in his responses to jei's every move; he feels like an sixteenth-century soldier, waiting for a flash of an ankle or a glimpse of bare wrist.
jei sits on the couch and her shorts ride up her thigh and rin thinks about leaning over to bite that patch of skin; she smiles and rin thinks about kissing the curve of it, of pressing it like a flower between the pages of a well-loved book; jei laughs and bids him goodbye and says she'll see him tomorrow, and rin thinks, yes, please, tomorrow and the day after and after that. I would stay with you for the rest of my life.
"your hot chocolate is getting cold," she tells him, and he blinks, and she does the same. "what are you thinking about?"
you. i'm thinking about you. i'm thinking about kissing you for asking me what i'm thinking about. he smiles instead and shakes his head. instead, he says: "you make really good hot chocolate."
—
things get a little bit hazier. monday he's at her doorstep and kissing her on her front porch. tuesday sees them making out on her couch; his notes on the floor along with his shirt. wednesday has rin staying the night again. he sleeps next to her this time.
usually he says he prefers sleeping on the floor, a big, fluffy carpet she tries not to trip over at night. there's a part of jei that thinks: maybe he doesn't want me as much as he said he does. but tonight she wakes up with tears on her cheeks and his tongue lapping at her face.
"rin?"
he whines and whimpers and buries his damp nose against her neck. fur rescinds from his skin and she can hear his bones shift and break and turn him back into the boy she --
"you were crying in your sleep," he mumbles, shuddering a little. jei reaches up to touch his hair; it's no longer a brilliant blue, but she likes it nonetheless, and memorises the sensation of his fluffy tresses in her fingers. "last time, you didn't wake up."
"last time?"
he nods, and shudders, and she quietly invites him under the covers with her. the vast expanse of his skin no longer fazes her, but when her hands go around his chest and the pads of her fingers brush against the light scars on his back, she is struck once again by how beautiful he is.
rin doesn't say anything else, though, so neither does she, and this is how she learns to fall asleep without thinking of dark shadows seeping from under her bed and dragging her to eternal torment.
she breathes him in and falls asleep thinking of how houses have hearts and how that makes them into homes.
—
he's doing morning stretches again and this time jei doesn't turn away before she can see him smile and wave at her. she doesn't turn away before he hugs her and heads back inside.
no, she doesn't turn away at all.
