Quite Casually [FFXII, Fran/Balthier]
Catching up on belated prompts~
Fandom: FFXII: pre-OGC
Author: ellnyx
Title: Quite Casually
Prompt: June 26, Balthier/Fran: straight up missionary-style fucking - "I can't remember when we last did it like this."
Rating/Content: NC-17, sex, first times.
Word Count: 2900
A/N: Part of [this] timeline.
Summary: They're both fine with the idea of sex. It's the intimacy that sneaks up on them, and always when they're too tired to fight it off.
.
Long after Balthier no doubt hoped she had forgotten, Fran remembered the last time they did it like this.
Well over a year ago Fran had been alerted to Balthier's presence in Balfonheim by his open posting for engineers and hunt-partners. With some care, Fran ambushed him prior to any of his scheduled interviews. She knew Balthier from her time in Archades, her days spent idled away in the shipwrights' guild of students and dreamers. The Strahl was an Archadian companion from those days whose form proved more familiar to her than Balthier's: the ship had a reputation of reticence and violent caprice in the hands of an unskilled trade, and after months contracted to serve on far lesser vessels Fran ached for a challenge.
What she found was a puzzle: Balthier had gained inches and lost his pretty uniform, perhaps wise when Balfonheim flew a flag of all nations. He had been so much younger and fatter than a year or two could justify. It seemed he did not remember her, not even when she gave her name. Balthier offered his hand before his greeting, polite even when eagerness would trip him. Fran took it.
Balthier's eyes narrowed; he looked at her fingers, curled around his but lightly, with an arch to keep her claws from his skin. 'I apologise for my presumption, but you seem familiar.'
'You may keep your apology. I cannot speak for your knowledge, but I know you from the shipwrights guild, of the Akademy. You did frequent our haunts for a few months. We worked on this fair ship's schematic until the day came Draklor commandeered her blueprints. But it seems you have commandeered her back?'
His grin was at once rueful and delighted. 'A story for another day, Fran, and as I have an apology spare, please do take it for my poor memory instead. Faces and names, I have difficulty remembering them. Though memory does tell me you dressed somewhat differently back in those days?'
Fran smoothed her bodice, stopped only when she realized she was adjusting herself to match his gaze. 'I do enjoy dressing up.'
'With qualifications like yours,' Balthier stuttered on his recovery, and with effort dragged his eyes back to hers, '-the guild, of course, the shipwrights' guild, well, you seem too well suited to the position for me to want to decline.'
Fran's upbringing had conditioned her to accept his height and lean build as an acceptable body type in a partner, a hunter who preferred wide-ranging much as she had been taught was correct. As to his masculinity, that was Fran's choice, a preference developed over years accruing experience both favorable and inexplicable. And as for why Balthier, maturity and a few hungry days hunting had gifted his figure with an elegance of line that would have made him conspicuous anywhere, of a type that she expected could perform.
Balthier wore his collar open that day, permitting Fran to fix on the hollows beneath his clavicle as he showed her through the ship; strangely enough, he had removed all the armaments that Fran remembered as having prize of place on his initial blueprints, and was full of enthusiasm for further modification. When she made up her bunk at his direction, she discovered all the bedding smelt of him. She brought herself off before she could sleep, thinking of the curve of Balthier's collarbones, the movement of his throat when he spoke, and the way his native pallor permitted him to colour so robustly, from pink to red and occasionally to purple, such an endearing response to the placement of her fingers so chaste upon his arm.
By the end of the week Balthier broached, with a half-dreamy incredulity that spoke volumes of his usual application of boundaries, the possibility that perhaps their sleeping arrangements might be open to negotiation.
'We know how it is,' Balthier addressed the slight dent in the panel over Fran's right shoulder, addressing neither what 'it' was nor what state 'it' was in. 'We understand that the normal proprieties might have to be somewhat relaxed in our current situation.'
'Do we now?'
Balthier laboured to retain some control over the situation, himself, and his fragments of composure. 'I'm sorry - it was nothing - I thought you-' Balthier's hands, having failed to articulate his intent any better, settled behind his back in a tight wrist to wrist clasp. The posture displayed his collarbones against the frame of a half-open shirt, but Fran only partly noticed. The reedy strain of his voice, come so soon on the mellow tones of his prior statement, made Fran feel awkward as though she had been the one so gauche. She wondered (not for the first nor last time) whether the 'we' Balthier had so blithely applied to the situation was not, in fact, the sum total of her and he.
'Do you not,' he began again, with a mild stutter, 'find me attractive?'
His hands had since recoiled, fingers tying knots about each other. Fran regarded the display of rings that striped his fingers: aventurine and rose quartz, lapis and chalcedony, semi-precious child's-stone displayed in lieu of the more customary metals of a wealthy man.
'Take your shirt off,' Fran replied, 'and we'll see.'
Balthier proved well-experienced with kissing, made for it. His hands were the mystery that even in the process of undressing Fran, all her bows and laces of Rozzarian make and model, he avoided caressing her. Fran was only disturbed by that contrary utilitarianism once they were actually prone, Balthier hovering above her with desperate intent clear in his eyes - yet his hands were planted on either side of her shoulders, his arms shaking with the effort to hold his continued distance.
'Put it in?' (She will admit she whined it, by that stage; rare it was to be kissed so teasingly for such, such a long time, his mouth somehow smaller, neater than she expected it to be, firm and narrow and startling once it opened; oh, she whined.)
Balthier tried to comply with only his hips and his cock's aptitude for perpendicularity to assist; his hands stayed planted, and succeeded in restricting Fran's own arm range that she could not reach between them to show him the way.
'Uh,' he said eventually (each moment lasting positive eons), 'your thighs are in the way.'
'My thighs are in the way? My thighs are the end goal of this enterprise, how can they possibly be in the way?'
'Oh please,' Balthier deflected insistently, a distractive rebuff, 'the end goal? As though - well, if it weren't rude I'd suggest you had your eyes on my-'
Right then the occurrence of penetration struck from them both the resolve to talk. Perhaps in response he had stopped thinking of himself for long enough instinct could reassert the way. Fran noted much later that Balthier often did instinctively what was right: it was his cognizance that tripped him.
Balthier found her depth with a surety then compromised by his hesitancy on the recoil: he kept a rhythm tentative enough to taunt. Fran arched. The frustration when he slipped free elicited itself as a violent fuck, followed by a mutual baring of teeth that only hinted at the convention of a smile.
At that point Fran considered herself taunted to a fevered pitch of passion, so with a maligned yet well-muscled thigh, she fought free of Balthier's conventional pose and pinned him on his back. Fran might have resented Balthier's faint, desperate obscenities as she fucked him, his fists curled around the frame of the bed and thoroughly white-knuckled, had such cursing not been accompanied by an unleashing of a restraint Fran had not known was there until its absence. Balthier's taut, puzzled expression, the rigidity of his shoulders, turned liquid like a hundred rigid patterns suddenly swirled into each other, and he struck her as becomingly beautiful once he had at last relaxed.
-until he spoke with a strangely loving hesitancy, 'Well, we can't stay like this forever,' and Fran realized he had come. His hands were still curled. He had made no attempt to touch her at all, but for the necessary extent for this to qualify as sex.
Perhaps Balthier thought that was the worst, a treachery that betrayed him as either inexperienced, or too committed for the sort of performance a single encounter approached with such nonchalance should have commanded from his flesh.
For months after, he had made up for what he saw as weakness with convolution of effort, a gritted determination and a textbook knowledge of one hundred and twenty-one different positions, to relax only marginally when months became a year (he permitted himself some repeats, then). Such was the complication of his loving intent that Fran was, in general, content that they made love with something that bordered on the formality of a grand ball; he often left her limping, if contentedly. Balthier would pass her an invitation, or offer his company with a courtly bow; they would be aground, of course, with time, money to spare, and a large bed beneath them for comfort.
Control, Fran realized eventually, and trust: he could not release the first, and he did not give himself the benefit of the latter.
When they worked on the engines, when they flew or fought together, Balthier spoke to Fran as though she were a brother in arms, a colleague. When they fucked, he treated her like an exotic whore. His retreat from that latter conversation was ever with a vague bewildered shame, masked by an intensification of his usual bombastic bluster.
His world had been one full of men. Fran did not find such monotony of gender unusual in any child's upbringing, but found it rather unusual Balthier, so clearly in retreat from that upbringing, nevertheless abided by the conventions of his youth: a convention which told him that men and women had but two languages through which to communicate. While Balthier was unfamiliar with the linguistic structure of a marriage, he could use the full vocabulary of this, second, other kind of relation.
Fran knew the scars that convention could leave. She kept her words and gave Balthier her silence.
So, of this afternoon into which Fran was awakened unexpectedly (they had been long at a hunt the night prior), she was content enough to pretend she still slept. In the absence of all other noise, the sound of Balthier's fist moving against the sheets would have been what woke her. He kept his rhythm slow but forceful. Fran imagined the expression on his face, the way he would dissolve into one of his few unconflicted moments after he came; her own desire awoke, as slow and forceful as the rhythm he kept, in an anticipation keyed by his own.
She yawned when she spoke. 'Bal---hier.'
'Fran,' he said, after a long moment, voice gravelly with exhaustion, 'I didn't mean to wake you.'
'Still, I am awake now.'
Balthier continued to stroke, if thoughtfully, if Fran could describe a base action by a higher concept.
'T'was an offer,' Fran clarified, as was often necessary with him.
Balthier moved in increments, beside her first and not quite atop her, his leg worming between hers and his hips askew, most of one side still prone; either he did not trust her with his weight, or perhaps he thought to spare her from it. She would point out her musculature more than matched his, but his motion was so unconscious she did not want to fully wake him.
Balthier's flesh felt hot, yet dry as though he had been baked of all his sense in the sun. His lips languished in the hollow of her throat, slack and lazy, his thighs finding their place to let the thick weight of his cock nestle without pressure. His fingers danced a taunt along her belly, her breast, to dart between where his lips pressed against her skin. He was discreet when he spat, and silent, his lips dry as soon as they returned to her flesh, his wet fingers to stroke between her legs.
Balthier's lashes flicked against Fran's neck, once, twice, a butterfly's kiss, his eyes still closed and reluctant to open. If Balthier dreamed, Fran wondered, was this of what he dreamed? A woman who opened to his hand (his touch was not so practiced when weighed by exhaustion but he was sure of her now); Fran was tired, and Balthier was tired, and that kept them from building any barriers to easy completion.
When he rolled at last his weight proved welcome, as though the pressure held Fran down in his turgid dreaming. His cock pressed within her as though it were an afterthought, Balthier's motion mostly in the roll of his forehead against her shoulder. His breathing was heavy, breathing her deeply as though her skin was an intoxicant.
'I'm being lazy,' and with a groan he tried to swallow, Balthier moved back onto his heels and made as though to hoist her ankles to his shoulders.
'Put your arms around me,' Fran said, 'please.'
His hips rolled, and hers. Balthier settled to match the corner of his eye to hers, his nose alongside hers, his lips a whisker's distance from hers. She had to pout just to kiss him. His mouth curved downwards, slack with sleep.
'Feels good,' he admitted. 'For you?'
'Put your arms around me.'
Even that whisker's distance disappeared when Balthier did so, one hand finding the small of her back where her spine's curve created an opening, the other about her shoulders. His cock slipped free only to slide home again as soon as his lips found their place just below her jawbone. Fran turned, just her head, to face him, and settled her heels in the hollows behind his knees.
Fran wondered if he had ever been held so closely. His arms tightened, his bicep lifting her shoulder, uncomfortable; she would not speak a word against it. Within, the roll of his hips scarcely moved his cock, but enough, enough.
'I'm so sorry,' he whispered. 'Usually I put in more effort, but I'm so tired.'
'I'm so glad,' Fran replied.
'You are?'
His words always made him feel better, especially when he heard his own arguments adopted. Fran licked her lips and replied. 'Feels good.'
'It does? I didn't think -' His lips opened to let his tongue taste her, his knees shifting a microscopic margin closer. She arched against him. 'Can you - will you put your arms around me?'
Fran did not blush, but felt ashamed nonetheless to have asked him for affection, that which he held always in reserve, yet not offered anything in return. She unclenched her fingers from the sheets and laced them behind the small of his back.
'If we could stay like this forever,' Balthier said, and yawned into her hair, and gave no further qualifier to his statement or a desired outcome.
Fran tightened her grip.
The space between them grew less again.
.
It was long after that, showered, dressed, fed again and clothed in the security of their various roles, that Fran even considered their most recent encounter as significant. It was as though every other bedroom encounter with Balthier had been a performance for an unknown audience, but not that first, and not that last.
What had passed last night felt like only the second time they had slept together.
It did not strike Fran so during the immediacy of it, only now, weighed in afterthought, for at their displaced breakfast (it was well into evening) Balthier neglected to offer his usual strained courtesy and uncomfortable smiles, that which always rode on their encounters. Instead he slid directly into conversation of the next possible hunts while still half-chewing a pastry.
His collar Balthier had left quite casually open. Fran contemplated the sparkle of his latest pendant, which caught a hint of sun on the upper end of each quick inhalation. Such was the dedication of her focus that she did not notice as Balthier's monologue trailed into silence.
'May I ask, why do you keep staring at me right there?' Balthier's fingers touched his throat, gentle and aimless. 'It's somewhat disconcerting.'
'I like your shoulders,' Fran said. 'It's all I can see of your skin, there, the hollow of your throat where the bones don't meet, when you're dressed.'
She surprised herself possibly more than Balthier with that directness, one that neither of them found comfortable.
'Thank you,' he replied, not altogether humbly; it seemed he had outgrown his blushes, bluster becoming something new. 'I like your thighs.'
The weightiness of all of Fran's consideration felt suddenly released, a strange, unacknowledged and breathless anxiety turned to exhilaration. 'Only my thighs?'
'Also your knees,' Balthier protested, suddenly grinning, daylight in his eyes, 'and precisely one inch square of the nape of your neck, where your hair curls.' His finger traced a kiss-curl in the wet of condensation spilled on the table between them.
While his jest was not delivered as absently as usual, it was usual, and it was that which had Fran lift her glass in salute to an abstract concept she was sure neither of them could articulate.
Balthier's glass met hers solidly, and quite casually, they drank.
.
Fandom: FFXII: pre-OGC
Author: ellnyx
Title: Quite Casually
Prompt: June 26, Balthier/Fran: straight up missionary-style fucking - "I can't remember when we last did it like this."
Rating/Content: NC-17, sex, first times.
Word Count: 2900
A/N: Part of [this] timeline.
Summary: They're both fine with the idea of sex. It's the intimacy that sneaks up on them, and always when they're too tired to fight it off.
.
Long after Balthier no doubt hoped she had forgotten, Fran remembered the last time they did it like this.
Well over a year ago Fran had been alerted to Balthier's presence in Balfonheim by his open posting for engineers and hunt-partners. With some care, Fran ambushed him prior to any of his scheduled interviews. She knew Balthier from her time in Archades, her days spent idled away in the shipwrights' guild of students and dreamers. The Strahl was an Archadian companion from those days whose form proved more familiar to her than Balthier's: the ship had a reputation of reticence and violent caprice in the hands of an unskilled trade, and after months contracted to serve on far lesser vessels Fran ached for a challenge.
What she found was a puzzle: Balthier had gained inches and lost his pretty uniform, perhaps wise when Balfonheim flew a flag of all nations. He had been so much younger and fatter than a year or two could justify. It seemed he did not remember her, not even when she gave her name. Balthier offered his hand before his greeting, polite even when eagerness would trip him. Fran took it.
Balthier's eyes narrowed; he looked at her fingers, curled around his but lightly, with an arch to keep her claws from his skin. 'I apologise for my presumption, but you seem familiar.'
'You may keep your apology. I cannot speak for your knowledge, but I know you from the shipwrights guild, of the Akademy. You did frequent our haunts for a few months. We worked on this fair ship's schematic until the day came Draklor commandeered her blueprints. But it seems you have commandeered her back?'
His grin was at once rueful and delighted. 'A story for another day, Fran, and as I have an apology spare, please do take it for my poor memory instead. Faces and names, I have difficulty remembering them. Though memory does tell me you dressed somewhat differently back in those days?'
Fran smoothed her bodice, stopped only when she realized she was adjusting herself to match his gaze. 'I do enjoy dressing up.'
'With qualifications like yours,' Balthier stuttered on his recovery, and with effort dragged his eyes back to hers, '-the guild, of course, the shipwrights' guild, well, you seem too well suited to the position for me to want to decline.'
Fran's upbringing had conditioned her to accept his height and lean build as an acceptable body type in a partner, a hunter who preferred wide-ranging much as she had been taught was correct. As to his masculinity, that was Fran's choice, a preference developed over years accruing experience both favorable and inexplicable. And as for why Balthier, maturity and a few hungry days hunting had gifted his figure with an elegance of line that would have made him conspicuous anywhere, of a type that she expected could perform.
Balthier wore his collar open that day, permitting Fran to fix on the hollows beneath his clavicle as he showed her through the ship; strangely enough, he had removed all the armaments that Fran remembered as having prize of place on his initial blueprints, and was full of enthusiasm for further modification. When she made up her bunk at his direction, she discovered all the bedding smelt of him. She brought herself off before she could sleep, thinking of the curve of Balthier's collarbones, the movement of his throat when he spoke, and the way his native pallor permitted him to colour so robustly, from pink to red and occasionally to purple, such an endearing response to the placement of her fingers so chaste upon his arm.
By the end of the week Balthier broached, with a half-dreamy incredulity that spoke volumes of his usual application of boundaries, the possibility that perhaps their sleeping arrangements might be open to negotiation.
'We know how it is,' Balthier addressed the slight dent in the panel over Fran's right shoulder, addressing neither what 'it' was nor what state 'it' was in. 'We understand that the normal proprieties might have to be somewhat relaxed in our current situation.'
'Do we now?'
Balthier laboured to retain some control over the situation, himself, and his fragments of composure. 'I'm sorry - it was nothing - I thought you-' Balthier's hands, having failed to articulate his intent any better, settled behind his back in a tight wrist to wrist clasp. The posture displayed his collarbones against the frame of a half-open shirt, but Fran only partly noticed. The reedy strain of his voice, come so soon on the mellow tones of his prior statement, made Fran feel awkward as though she had been the one so gauche. She wondered (not for the first nor last time) whether the 'we' Balthier had so blithely applied to the situation was not, in fact, the sum total of her and he.
'Do you not,' he began again, with a mild stutter, 'find me attractive?'
His hands had since recoiled, fingers tying knots about each other. Fran regarded the display of rings that striped his fingers: aventurine and rose quartz, lapis and chalcedony, semi-precious child's-stone displayed in lieu of the more customary metals of a wealthy man.
'Take your shirt off,' Fran replied, 'and we'll see.'
Balthier proved well-experienced with kissing, made for it. His hands were the mystery that even in the process of undressing Fran, all her bows and laces of Rozzarian make and model, he avoided caressing her. Fran was only disturbed by that contrary utilitarianism once they were actually prone, Balthier hovering above her with desperate intent clear in his eyes - yet his hands were planted on either side of her shoulders, his arms shaking with the effort to hold his continued distance.
'Put it in?' (She will admit she whined it, by that stage; rare it was to be kissed so teasingly for such, such a long time, his mouth somehow smaller, neater than she expected it to be, firm and narrow and startling once it opened; oh, she whined.)
Balthier tried to comply with only his hips and his cock's aptitude for perpendicularity to assist; his hands stayed planted, and succeeded in restricting Fran's own arm range that she could not reach between them to show him the way.
'Uh,' he said eventually (each moment lasting positive eons), 'your thighs are in the way.'
'My thighs are in the way? My thighs are the end goal of this enterprise, how can they possibly be in the way?'
'Oh please,' Balthier deflected insistently, a distractive rebuff, 'the end goal? As though - well, if it weren't rude I'd suggest you had your eyes on my-'
Right then the occurrence of penetration struck from them both the resolve to talk. Perhaps in response he had stopped thinking of himself for long enough instinct could reassert the way. Fran noted much later that Balthier often did instinctively what was right: it was his cognizance that tripped him.
Balthier found her depth with a surety then compromised by his hesitancy on the recoil: he kept a rhythm tentative enough to taunt. Fran arched. The frustration when he slipped free elicited itself as a violent fuck, followed by a mutual baring of teeth that only hinted at the convention of a smile.
At that point Fran considered herself taunted to a fevered pitch of passion, so with a maligned yet well-muscled thigh, she fought free of Balthier's conventional pose and pinned him on his back. Fran might have resented Balthier's faint, desperate obscenities as she fucked him, his fists curled around the frame of the bed and thoroughly white-knuckled, had such cursing not been accompanied by an unleashing of a restraint Fran had not known was there until its absence. Balthier's taut, puzzled expression, the rigidity of his shoulders, turned liquid like a hundred rigid patterns suddenly swirled into each other, and he struck her as becomingly beautiful once he had at last relaxed.
-until he spoke with a strangely loving hesitancy, 'Well, we can't stay like this forever,' and Fran realized he had come. His hands were still curled. He had made no attempt to touch her at all, but for the necessary extent for this to qualify as sex.
Perhaps Balthier thought that was the worst, a treachery that betrayed him as either inexperienced, or too committed for the sort of performance a single encounter approached with such nonchalance should have commanded from his flesh.
For months after, he had made up for what he saw as weakness with convolution of effort, a gritted determination and a textbook knowledge of one hundred and twenty-one different positions, to relax only marginally when months became a year (he permitted himself some repeats, then). Such was the complication of his loving intent that Fran was, in general, content that they made love with something that bordered on the formality of a grand ball; he often left her limping, if contentedly. Balthier would pass her an invitation, or offer his company with a courtly bow; they would be aground, of course, with time, money to spare, and a large bed beneath them for comfort.
Control, Fran realized eventually, and trust: he could not release the first, and he did not give himself the benefit of the latter.
When they worked on the engines, when they flew or fought together, Balthier spoke to Fran as though she were a brother in arms, a colleague. When they fucked, he treated her like an exotic whore. His retreat from that latter conversation was ever with a vague bewildered shame, masked by an intensification of his usual bombastic bluster.
His world had been one full of men. Fran did not find such monotony of gender unusual in any child's upbringing, but found it rather unusual Balthier, so clearly in retreat from that upbringing, nevertheless abided by the conventions of his youth: a convention which told him that men and women had but two languages through which to communicate. While Balthier was unfamiliar with the linguistic structure of a marriage, he could use the full vocabulary of this, second, other kind of relation.
Fran knew the scars that convention could leave. She kept her words and gave Balthier her silence.
So, of this afternoon into which Fran was awakened unexpectedly (they had been long at a hunt the night prior), she was content enough to pretend she still slept. In the absence of all other noise, the sound of Balthier's fist moving against the sheets would have been what woke her. He kept his rhythm slow but forceful. Fran imagined the expression on his face, the way he would dissolve into one of his few unconflicted moments after he came; her own desire awoke, as slow and forceful as the rhythm he kept, in an anticipation keyed by his own.
She yawned when she spoke. 'Bal---hier.'
'Fran,' he said, after a long moment, voice gravelly with exhaustion, 'I didn't mean to wake you.'
'Still, I am awake now.'
Balthier continued to stroke, if thoughtfully, if Fran could describe a base action by a higher concept.
'T'was an offer,' Fran clarified, as was often necessary with him.
Balthier moved in increments, beside her first and not quite atop her, his leg worming between hers and his hips askew, most of one side still prone; either he did not trust her with his weight, or perhaps he thought to spare her from it. She would point out her musculature more than matched his, but his motion was so unconscious she did not want to fully wake him.
Balthier's flesh felt hot, yet dry as though he had been baked of all his sense in the sun. His lips languished in the hollow of her throat, slack and lazy, his thighs finding their place to let the thick weight of his cock nestle without pressure. His fingers danced a taunt along her belly, her breast, to dart between where his lips pressed against her skin. He was discreet when he spat, and silent, his lips dry as soon as they returned to her flesh, his wet fingers to stroke between her legs.
Balthier's lashes flicked against Fran's neck, once, twice, a butterfly's kiss, his eyes still closed and reluctant to open. If Balthier dreamed, Fran wondered, was this of what he dreamed? A woman who opened to his hand (his touch was not so practiced when weighed by exhaustion but he was sure of her now); Fran was tired, and Balthier was tired, and that kept them from building any barriers to easy completion.
When he rolled at last his weight proved welcome, as though the pressure held Fran down in his turgid dreaming. His cock pressed within her as though it were an afterthought, Balthier's motion mostly in the roll of his forehead against her shoulder. His breathing was heavy, breathing her deeply as though her skin was an intoxicant.
'I'm being lazy,' and with a groan he tried to swallow, Balthier moved back onto his heels and made as though to hoist her ankles to his shoulders.
'Put your arms around me,' Fran said, 'please.'
His hips rolled, and hers. Balthier settled to match the corner of his eye to hers, his nose alongside hers, his lips a whisker's distance from hers. She had to pout just to kiss him. His mouth curved downwards, slack with sleep.
'Feels good,' he admitted. 'For you?'
'Put your arms around me.'
Even that whisker's distance disappeared when Balthier did so, one hand finding the small of her back where her spine's curve created an opening, the other about her shoulders. His cock slipped free only to slide home again as soon as his lips found their place just below her jawbone. Fran turned, just her head, to face him, and settled her heels in the hollows behind his knees.
Fran wondered if he had ever been held so closely. His arms tightened, his bicep lifting her shoulder, uncomfortable; she would not speak a word against it. Within, the roll of his hips scarcely moved his cock, but enough, enough.
'I'm so sorry,' he whispered. 'Usually I put in more effort, but I'm so tired.'
'I'm so glad,' Fran replied.
'You are?'
His words always made him feel better, especially when he heard his own arguments adopted. Fran licked her lips and replied. 'Feels good.'
'It does? I didn't think -' His lips opened to let his tongue taste her, his knees shifting a microscopic margin closer. She arched against him. 'Can you - will you put your arms around me?'
Fran did not blush, but felt ashamed nonetheless to have asked him for affection, that which he held always in reserve, yet not offered anything in return. She unclenched her fingers from the sheets and laced them behind the small of his back.
'If we could stay like this forever,' Balthier said, and yawned into her hair, and gave no further qualifier to his statement or a desired outcome.
Fran tightened her grip.
The space between them grew less again.
.
It was long after that, showered, dressed, fed again and clothed in the security of their various roles, that Fran even considered their most recent encounter as significant. It was as though every other bedroom encounter with Balthier had been a performance for an unknown audience, but not that first, and not that last.
What had passed last night felt like only the second time they had slept together.
It did not strike Fran so during the immediacy of it, only now, weighed in afterthought, for at their displaced breakfast (it was well into evening) Balthier neglected to offer his usual strained courtesy and uncomfortable smiles, that which always rode on their encounters. Instead he slid directly into conversation of the next possible hunts while still half-chewing a pastry.
His collar Balthier had left quite casually open. Fran contemplated the sparkle of his latest pendant, which caught a hint of sun on the upper end of each quick inhalation. Such was the dedication of her focus that she did not notice as Balthier's monologue trailed into silence.
'May I ask, why do you keep staring at me right there?' Balthier's fingers touched his throat, gentle and aimless. 'It's somewhat disconcerting.'
'I like your shoulders,' Fran said. 'It's all I can see of your skin, there, the hollow of your throat where the bones don't meet, when you're dressed.'
She surprised herself possibly more than Balthier with that directness, one that neither of them found comfortable.
'Thank you,' he replied, not altogether humbly; it seemed he had outgrown his blushes, bluster becoming something new. 'I like your thighs.'
The weightiness of all of Fran's consideration felt suddenly released, a strange, unacknowledged and breathless anxiety turned to exhilaration. 'Only my thighs?'
'Also your knees,' Balthier protested, suddenly grinning, daylight in his eyes, 'and precisely one inch square of the nape of your neck, where your hair curls.' His finger traced a kiss-curl in the wet of condensation spilled on the table between them.
While his jest was not delivered as absently as usual, it was usual, and it was that which had Fran lift her glass in salute to an abstract concept she was sure neither of them could articulate.
Balthier's glass met hers solidly, and quite casually, they drank.
.