He had himself shielded in a dark corner of the pub upstairs, so much so that I nearly didn't notice or recognize him. But his eyes rolled up toward me just as I walked toward waiting friends. They would wait, and if they saw him understand. With the drums shaking the floor from the stage below, I wove unsteady steps to his table. Offering my hand across it, I grinned, licking lips still blood red and sweet from chocolate-dipped strawberry Beltane kisses. He took it. The look he gave me had something of a diabolical hunger to it, and his touch seared every sense and inch of me. Pulling himself up along the length of me, he hissed in my ear "I know you." A laugh escaped from deep in my throat and caught in black waves of his hair. As I snaked my hand around the nape of his neck, he pulled my other arm behind me, forcing me into his jacket. To fight back, I bit his lower lip and shifted my hips to tease. His low growl of a laugh brushed my shoulder as I spun to release myself and pull him downstairs.
With his hat angled low over green fire opal eyes, he quickly followed. In a crowd painted green, blue, red, and all earthly colors, we disappeared. I already had streaks of white across my cheeks, and I could tell at least a drummer and some chaos had found him earlier in the night. Picking up the changing rhythm the drummers beat, I found one of his legs between mine, his hands gripping my waist. The curl of tattoos up one arm held me as we shook, and swayed, and pounded the floor with our feet. In brief flashes, I could make out the look on his face - mischievous, incendiary, and so beautiful I coughed for air. When I could breathe again, I drew myself down his legs, climbed back up at his hips with hands on tense, tender skin. We moved with murderous, measured intent, as a serpent uncoils. I put my hand at his back, and a shiver sent his eyes wide open. We both knew it then - all the lovers, and the waking and sleeping dreams wound up here. Held true.
"Let's go home," I said. He nodded. Throwing my cloak around me, I walked him out through my city's early morning. The Castle, the cobblestones, the doors whispering of centuries gone down behind, all greeted us with still-cutting, cold stars and thick mist. At the top of the Mound, he kissed me. A burn like whiskey spread through me, his lips a smoky, full, savage heat. Never had a kiss so consumed and eaten at me, a lick of flame that burned away all else. He met my hunger, and thirst, with a taste that stirred desires in the deepest of me. With dawn breaking over Edinburgh, I could feel the fog swallowing us whole, knit so closely I thought I might melt.
At last I couldn't take it, and turned my teeth to gnaw slightly at his collarbone. With the light spilling over Leith, we still had a train ride to get him to my flat. The shock and fit of it all took over me in waves, and with the scent of his shoulders clearing my head of all else, I shook to keep from burning up. I finally had home, here. I could bend and weave anything with him, in this place.
Neither of us would later recall how we made it down to Waverley Station - fair bit of lust-led sleepwalking, I suppose. On the earliest train, I kept us invisible, handled the tickets and the talking. An unspoken language had formed so fast, and already I could read even the most mundane messages in the curl of a lip or deepening shade in his eyes. I spoke for us.
Linlithgow greeted us in silence and anticipation as we followed worn cobblestones to my flat. The silence ended at my door. Taking him by the collar, I pulled him to me with such force I rent his t-shirt in half. Again the throaty laugh of the gods themselves came at me, a self-satisfied grin lighting him ear to ear. Teasing around the tattoos on his chest with my tongue, he groaned and threw me back, catching the tie to my shirt. I took some unwrapping - three turns of kimono ribbons gave him enough to undo and bind me to him all at once. With a simple swift push he pinned me to the wall. The force snapped a chopstick in my hair, and I flung the other into the front room. He took my throat in one guitar-calloused hand and bit just below my ear. His other hand then pulled my hair down loose, a cascade over my neck and his. Splaying my fingers down his hips, I pried open the studs of his belt, my wrists still tethered to him with shirt ribbons. He cradled my head in his hands as I kissed over the arrow his stomach made, one side and the other. With so much of him covered in ink, I could read every twinge of pleasure in his muscles.
"Carissima mia, ti conosco, anche," I traced in his left hip with my lips. He moaned a reply in Saami. I took that for a good sign, and kept at it. For a few seconds, he let me. And then in a swift, lithe series of movements, I was over his shoulder, in the bedroom, and flung on pillows. He leaned in to bite my side, a free hand completely unwrapping me from my shirt.
"Such good dreams, and they were nothing to this," he sighed, arcing back, his head cocked to the side, the devil in his smile and his hands. His movements toward me were feline, and I responded by pulling his unruly hair to kiss him so hard he rolled down onto me. My tongue tasted the spice at his lips, tears in the corners of my eyes as months of waiting broke on me.
"I know; I waited too," I breathed in his ear. I was sure if I turned round, I would see Desire herself in my corner chair, smiling at the want and fire in the room. He caught his breath then, and with it released the pain of what had felt too long a wait for us both. Smooth strong arms reached for my hair, his fingers moving it from the pool at my neck to lay it all out behind me. My curls and tears now to his satisfaction, he keened "so I'm not waiting anymore."
Off came my pants in one quick sweep I'd never seen before. He grabbed my hips to tip me to one side, then face down in sheets the color of blood. His hands got the hook at my skirt, but his teeth tugged the zipper down slowly. I squirmed at being teased, and he smacked my backside. I blushed deeper at this, and tried to turn over to strip and punish him. On first attempt I discovered his hand at the base of my spine, gently blocking my protest. "Uh-unh," he chuckled through teeth still gritted at my back. "Do you want me to come back there and tear your clothes off? Do I have to kick your ass?" I threatened.
"Yes please," he mock-begged me in return, letting go of the zipper, now undone at last.
"Done," I swore, and set to work removing his pants in retaliation. My fingers hooked his waistband as I spun around and peeled him out of them. They found themselves in a far corner of the room as I finally pinned him to the foot of the bed, triumphant. The charge of all his skin under me, new, to be explored, had me in near-bacchic ecstasy. My hands found him something more than willing, pressing playfully against me.
