Little Women Fic: A Night to Remember, Chapter 4 (Jo/Laurie)
This will, sadly, likely be the last time I update this fic until the summer releases me from the burdens of schooling. But at the least, I finally, finally got to write some smut and got comfortable with Laurie's POV. It's odd-- it's as though the character suddenly started talking right into my ear and wouldn't shut up until I had finished off this chapter for spring break. It's almost as though he was willing to nag and nag until I let him do as he pleased... ;)
In any case, thanks again for all the lovely, lovely constructive reviews for chapter 3. They helped a ridiculous amount in fashioning my characterization for Laurie! Special thanks have to go to Dream's Sister, whose beautiful missives on Laurie helped with my break-through, and Elisabeth Harker, who actually helped me roleplay this and the follow chapter. Some of Jo's dialog comes straight from her mind and if you aren't reading her new fic, Braver Than We Are, you're missing out!
Thanks again and please drop a review if you liked the chapter. It really thrills me as both a writer and fangirl of the series. ;)
Title: A Night To Remember, Chapter 4
Fandom: Little Women
Series: A Night to Remember
Characters/Pairings: Jo/Laurie, Amy, Fred, Cast
Rating: Hard R This Chapter, Later NC-17
Summary: She had told him: "I can't betray my sister like this." And he had looked at her with those dark, frantic eyes and whispered: "You are going to be the death of me." Jo, Laurie, and what could have been and might still be.
Note: The long-promised sex finally rears its head in this chapter, albeit not all that explicitly as of yet. Beware delicate sensibilities!
***
Last Chapter:
And when he finally heard her call out his name from the midst of her inner chambers, Mr. Theodore Laurence smiled himself back to a state of apparent calm, smoothed back his dark curls, straightened his slightly creased shirt, and stepped to the doors that would shield them both from the eyes of the outside world during their first true night as married beings.
There were no complete endings possible with Jo, only grand new beginnings. And he meant to make this one as happy as possible, no matter what else might happen tonight or tomorrow or during all the rest of their years.
***
After all the epic waiting and reminiscing he had just been doing outside of his wife's hallowed wooden doors, Mr. Theodore Laurence would not have been in the least surprised if the doors has refused to budge when he rose up to open them, the night finding yet another way to impede his entry. But thankfully, to his nervous surprise and very real delight, they swung their way open easily enough at his light touch, as though they had been waiting more for him than the other way around. And when he finally stepped forward to commence on with that grand new beginning he had promised himself earlier, it felt as though nothing in the world could at last get in the way of his delight at being with his wife presently.
Inside the bedroom, it was very cozy and bright, with more candles casting their faint coronas than had been featured in the hall he had paced previously. Golden light shone upon the fine wood of the doors and furniture and floors, and collected in pools and puddles along the fine upholstery he had imported from Europe to make Jo's contortions during writing as easy as could be. And in the middle of all the careful splendor, sitting quite serenely at the long chaise settee he had chosen specifically for her fits of being literary, was Jo-- her pilgrim hands folded in her lap, her eyes gazing down at her knees, her remarkable face reflected in the simple but grand mirror before her as though it were all the world wanted to see.
The woman before him, the one he had wanted for all his adult life, was not and never would be anything near a beauty. Nothing about her suggested feminine charm or dazzling grace, and Laurie would not have dreamed of disgracing her by telling her falsehoods about her figure or her face that her clear eyes would see through with ease. There was nothing about her long nose or hollow cheeks, about her gangly form or strong chin, that would drive sensitive poets in Europe to rhapsodize about her face, as had happened so often to Amy. There was no secret indentation of beauty to her, and no hidden cache of seductive clarity; nothing that might lead her to suddenly pull down her hair and be alight with loveliness any more than he could place himself in front of a manuscript and show off some previously unknown genius is his being.
She was simply his wife, vibrant and tenacious and integral and fierce, all the loveliness in her buried beneath her skull where so many overlooked it easily.
She simply was what she was, and if she asked now, Laurie would have told her that she was the finest creature on the face of the earth, and the only one he'd ever want completely.
But Jo had never asked and would never ask, would never want or need such assurances about conforming to the standards of fine society. So instead of launching into raptures about what the light did to her collarbones or the reflections of her avian eyes, Laurie simply leaned against the door, put his sauciest grin forward, and tried not to let the sudden pooling of desire between his stomach and his spine take over the evening.
“I’m not interrupting the start of a brilliant play that will take the country enough by storm soon, am I?” he finally asked when he could trust himself to speak, hoping his playfulness would temporarily mute his wish to kiss a path of fire from her collarbone down. “Because if I am, Jo, you are perfectly free to tell me off. I wouldn’t keep any wife of mine from genius for all the riches in the world or all the jewels of Grand Pare'e.”
For a moment, he almost thought she might not have heard him, that his voice had given his secret wishes away by coming forth as too harsh, too openly wanting. But after another pensive moment of reflection, Jo seemed to shake off whatever had been keeping her a thousand miles away from her physical form and looked up, the martial light in her eyes sending another exquisite shiver of tension snaking through his body.
"Actually," she replied, smiling sweetly, "I was wondering if my reflection here wanted to partake in some droll conversation... but I suppose that can be put off for another day. Since you're here, I may as well reconsider in the hopes that you'll be even more interesting."
Laurie had never known another woman that could start off a conversation with such tart sweetness; had never wanted to know, even. He trod a few careful steps toward her, as carefully as a man entering a lion's den... a metaphor not quite as outlandish as it might seem, given the gleam of those thrilling eyes as they met his in the mirror.
Although with a bit of luck, a fate far better than being mauled and eaten was awaiting for him in her arms now.
...Not that he'd mind just a bit of mauling. Not from Jo, at least.
"Oh?" he answered, keeping his face composed as he wound his way to her slowly. "More interesting than a reflection, you say? Dear Jo, you may be overestimating me. What makes you think that in a moment, I won't be tongue-tied by your radiance or completely undone by the raptures inspired by your delicacy?"
She threw an arched eyebrow at him, and he wished he could place the tiny smile tugging at the corners of her mouth into his pocket and have it for keeps. "Besides my complete lack of either radiance or delicacy?"
Most would have granted her the point but he wasn't about to concede yet. Instead, with a thoughtful look on his face, he pressed onward. "You're much too hard on yourself," he told her, still drawing near inch by inch, though he strove to look as though he cared not at all about being closer to her summer dark skin. "I'd say you are more than radiant just now-- more like completely luminous. No, no, even more than that... surely there's an even better word to describe you at present…?"
That tiny smile of hers was now threatening to blossom and spill all over her face, to transform it in that way he loved so much and once tried so hard so desperately. "I'd suggest lunacy but that word might suit you much better, my boy. Have you gotten into the laudanum again recently?"
"It was only that one time," he murmured, pouting winsomely at her, only a few steps away now, so close he could smell the delicate perfume she had doused herself with for tonight, a hide-and-seek smell of expensive violets that must have been a well meaning wedding present. "And how was I supposed to know about my... sensitivity before hand? I thought I was merely taking enough to care for a cold. I have no idea such an innocent spoonful could make me so… unseemly."
Jo straightened before the mirror and smiled coyly, in that way that merely meant more teasing torment from her end. "Oh, don't worry, my boy, no one's blaming you. Although I expect my father could have lived many more years in his long and adventurous life without walking in on you chasing me all about our house rooms whilst wielding a very pretty pinafore in the most alarming way possible."
He couldn't help his laugh when he finally reached her, one hand descending down to toy with her long, chestnut curls, his merry eyes meeting hers with the aid of the vanity mirror before them both. "Indeed! Though I now wonder if I should be insulted that he first thought my drug-addled self was attempting to get you to help me model the pinafore on my own, instead of on your beauteous body?"
Instead of protesting his lavish praise of her, Jo settled for looking terrifyingly thoughtful, thus frightening him even more. "Wait. Was that truly the case? I really thought you had suddenly taken on another flight of fancy and wanted to play heroine in my recent story. Oh dear… no wonder my poor father spent the entire week after counseling on what to do should I find my garments stretched out in later years."
For a minute, his hands actually froze on her dark waves of hair, his horrified face only relenting when they met the laughing eyes set in her lilting reflection. “…Then no wonder he also kept trying to tug away all the ceremonial ribbons away from me when we were decorating from the wedding. I simply assumed at the time that he thought I had atrocious taste!”
“But you do,” Jo pointed out, sensibly. “After all, you did choose me over Amy. Although personally, I wouldn’t terribly mind some new-found predilection for pinafores on your part. It wouldn’t do me any harm and in any case, it would make you all the more flexible when I need someone to read out a few lines from a play. Although I assume my father-and probably Marmee and Meg and John as well by now-may feel quite differently.”
With a groan, Laurie sank down to kiss the soft mass of hair at the back of his wife's head, drowning his humiliation in the tide of her sudden, warm laughter. "You do my masculinity great injustice, my darling. And now I’m not sure I’ll ever be able to see your family again without turning red in the face.”
“I think you exaggerate a bit,” Jo pointed out sensibly, one of her hands lifting up to pat his shoulder comfortably. “It’s true that Amy will always rue the fact that she almost married you and Aunt March has sworn she will never again see you and my father thinks you may have a few… er… interesting habits in the bedroom…”
“Habits?” Laurie muttered from his comfortable perch buried into her shoulder. “As in more than one? As in, at least two?!”
His wife coughed a bit, never a good sign. “You, ah, you shouldn’t worry about that so very much, Teddy. We’ve finally married so there’s not much he can say now about your purported predilection for women who cut a fine figure in pirate-themed pantaloons. I mean, as long as you keep said predilection confined to me, of course. He was already touchy over you, ehm, ‘deserting’ Amy. If he thought you were ready to do the same to me, war’s end or no, he’d probably take his old bayonet and run you right through.”
There was a long and terrible silence for a while, as Laurie’s mind processed that image with regrettable detail.
“Jo,” he finally said, in a tone of terrible and only half-feigned sadness, “when I am finally confined to a sanatorium because of you, my only satisfaction will be knowing that you will always be close at hand. Possibly in the very next room.”
She had the gall- he was currently refusing to admit it charmed him completely-to throw her long neck back and laugh. “Oh, Teddy, you are quite the romantic. European suites are not enough for us-we must have matching lunatic cells for two!”
Laurie laughed as well and then surfaced from the waterfall of her hair, his glittering eyes meeting her warm ones in the mirror once more. “When you put it like that, it doesn’t seem so terrible a deal. And even if you do eventually drive me mad, they do say the lunatic and the lover are one and the same. So now I must ask: given your predilection for plays, which would you rather have me be tonight? I remain ever your humble servant, willing to do whatever it is that you’d like me to."
Laurie had thought it a simple enough question when rehearsing it in his head before time, a way to gently let Jo know that he would follow her lead for tonight and allow her to decide whether to pursue or leave off intimacy for now. But instead of bantering back with one of her fierce, funny jabs, he actually felt Jo startle beneath his tender hands and throat, like a bird that had suddenly had its comfortable perch yanked from below. It was enough to make him still as well, and when his eyes again met hers in her silvered mirror, there was something dark and uncertain lurking beneath her brow as she carefully made out her next words.
"I..." she began, and her brown throat had to work too long and hard before she could muster her answer and decide her course. "I mean... simply... honestly, Teddy, sometimes I don't even understand those slippery words of yours. Sometimes I wish I could take that tongue of yours and wring out all its secrets. What could you possibly mean? What shall I order you toward?"
It was enough to make him falter as well, the soothing words about relaxing and easing into their new privacy deserting him when her vaguely panicked eyes met his and made his ears begin to burn. "Ah, well, simply that... I mean, I wanted you to decide what we would do tonight since this is, after all, our first night in real privacy, and I know that you're, probably, not all that used to, perhaps being with, well, someone else in this... sort of situation... currently..."
It was enough to make Jo’s summer tanned face turned a swift and merciless shade reminiscent of tomato paste, and enough to make Laurie curse the way he had fumbled the delicate situation so far. Jo usually took to change about as well as a nunnery took to a horde of marauding Vikings, and though she had permitted-- even encouraged!-- him to take certain liberties with her physical virtue in the past, she had been more than capable of pushing him away as well. And though their conversations could be nigh legendary is scope, neither of them had ever had the nerve to actually sit down and talk about their past lovers-or lack thereof - honestly. To be honest, Laurie did not even know if Jo was a virgin, or even if she wanted to make love to him. It was all a tangle to understand how she felt about intimacy, given how she seemed to sometimes do her deliberate best to drive him mad with desire... and at other times, seemed gun-shy of the topic entirely.
At least for now, she was far more the latter than the former, the flush on her face spreading down the arc of her neck and the lines of her collar to grace the curved top of her-- God, that nightgown was so filmy in the light it was practically indecent, not that he minded greatly. It took an enormous exertion of willpower for Laurie to force himself to look away from the arresting sight before him and back to her face, especially when Jo began to speak once more, her voice strangely quivery. "Oh! You mean if... if we should... be as... husband and wife... should be... as indeed we are... currently..."
He would have teased her about the way her grasp of the English language has seemingly deserted her, only it was difficult to speak when his own paralyzing fear of somehow mucking up an otherwise splendid night had him by the throat swiftly. It was, in fact, a throat he had to clear several times so that he wouldn't squeak out his next few words like a half-grown boy who still hadn't figured out how to approach the fascinating girl who lived next door. "Well. Well, yes. But of course-- only if you should want to! After all, we could do... so much else. Like read aloud to one another. As married people so often do."
There was a long and terrible silence for quite a time afterward. And if Laurie could have, he would have stepped outside the scene just then and slapped his own self upside the head for sounding like such a perfect fool. It was lovely how he had made them go from being a freshly married couple in the first flush of their life into a pair married into their dotage years, waiting for death and whiling away the time by knitting, twitting and piously reading whatever religious books they could still view.
Given all that, he couldn't blame Jo for looking at him quite dubiously, although at least she did so through the mirror, which cut down on the hideous embarrassment he felt slightly. "...Really?” she enquired at last. “Read aloud to each other? Is... that quite the thing that young men in the private company of young women very often like to do?"
Knowing very well what young men in the private company of young women mostly liked to do, himself very much not presently excluded, Laurie proceeded to lie as convincingly as he could. "Yes. Of course! I know... many young married couples who proceed to do just that with each other in Europe. Especially when they... ah... wish to put each other... ehm... at ease... and chase away their first few hours of… er… doom and gloom…"
He didn't trust the slight, wicked smile that was beginning to steal over his wife's warm face. "I'm not judging, my boy. Because if that is..."
(Oh, he could not believe she would stoop to teasing him at a time like this, when his blush was nearly as ferocious as hers. Jo truly never did let up with the teasing.)
(Not that he’d ever want her to, really.)
She was actually smirking a little as she went on, though her face was still flushed enough so that she wouldn't meet his gaze. "If it is, I imagine I don't have nearly as much to worry about in terms of your past as I did previously. Reading. Hmmm..."
Laurie wasted another few minutes with more fiendish embarrassment, pathetically wondering how anyone in the Laurence bloodline had managed to run a successful business empire if they had a brain anywhere near his. In fact, he only put himself together when he saw her blush beginning to fade a bit and he found the courage to roguishly answer. " Oh, believe me, Jo, you've got plenty to worry about while trying to harness me in the direction of general respectability. I wouldn’t let those worries fade away quite so soon!"
That made the dying flush on her face rise again, although he suspected at least some of it stemmed from a source quite opposed to anger. After all, though her mouth remained prim as she made out her next few words, it threatened to break out in a smile periodically. "Oh, is harnessing you now my primary occupation? I think I may have let myself in for far more trouble than any respectable woman ought to see."
And though he knew it was conceding their little game, he had to break the role to laugh and swoop down once more to kiss the part in her hair at her playful words, trying not to dizzy himself in the smell of her skin, sweet beyond the perfume fumes. She always tried so hard to forgive him, to smooth over the past that he wanted to forget and erase from her view.
His own words, when he could assemble them, were as light as he could manage. "Oh, probably. I hoped you enjoyed our complicated courtship, dear, because I shall only become a far more irritating presence in your life from here!"
Her words were nearly as dry as her gaze, as she pretended that she hadn’t seen his slight, temporary break. "Oh, trust me. Women everywhere, married or otherwise, know that about men already. Why do you think I stayed a spinster so long?"
He gave her another winsome smile for playing along, with some roguish self-assurance added for taste. "Your tragic lack of one Theodore Laurence in your life?"
"I shall," she announced primly, "let you go on believing that if it helps you sleep at night easily. The things I do for you."
It was enough to make Laurie laugh once more, as much in relief as anything else, feeling something warm in him as he saw the genuine pleasure that flooded her face at his own soothed feeling. And as soon as he saw that she was more at ease than she had been previously, the flush dying down on her cheeks and her eyes meeting his once more, he finally lay down on the long settee beside her, their hands once again entwining.
Jo looked almost impossibly welcoming when he was this close, her skin looking as though it was lit from within, and her lips so tempting it was all he could do to keep himself from claiming them instantly. In her spotless white gown, smelling of ink and rare flowers, she could have been an wild angel, or a heathen priestess, or a supernatural parlor trick, though the reality of her made all those other possibilities pale and melt away. And when he spoke again, it was only after he had lifted one of her long, work-scuffed hands to his lips, savoring the sight of her gray eyes widening as he languidly kissed her writerly calluses.
"As long as I can go to bed next to you, dear Jo, even your flying nocturnal elbows would not disturb my nightly peace. And what do you mean about worrying about my past? I hope..."
He hadn’t meant to sound self-conscious-- in fact, even as he tilted a charming smile at her, hoped ferociously so that that was not the case. But he couldn't quite help the neediness that found its way in regardless, even despite his continual efforts to stamp it out, to cut and burn it away from him, to disassociate entirely.
Jo didn't need to know this was him, or a part of him. She didn't need to see him as he was, rather than as he wanted to be.
He was going to be a better man for her. He had promised her that. In her eyes, the only eyes that mattered in the world, he couldn’t afford to be weak.
So Laurie stumbled on, his charm clinging precariously, even as his words stuck to his throat as he muddled through linguistically. "I mean, I hope you do not feel as though I am somehow..."
Tainted. Or disgraced. Or simply disgusting. Not that he deserved to be known as any better, any more than he deserved the woman sitting next to him now, her eyes clear and her mind spotless, her hands clean of hurt brought to so many innocent others who had had the ill luck to stumble on him when he had done his best to commit social suicide slowly.
He didn't deserve her, or anything of her. And for all the reconciling that they had done, there was some small, terrible part of him that still feared that one day she would understand as much and walk away, knowing that the dictates of society would mean nothing when it came to her conscience and moral clarity.
She could still leave him for all that he’d done. And no reasonable person on the face of earth would blame her for it either.
However, those thoughts of his were swept away in another moment, as his Jo straightened once more in her seat and brought both of her small, firm hands up to cup his own, her eyes wide and honest as it took in his sudden flicker of fear. "No! No, no, and a thousand times no! You don't even have to fill in those blanks-- I can see them written all over your face. No, Teddy, I don't care in the least about what you did in Europe, or even who you did it with. I wouldn't care if you had-- had-- I don't know-- installed a harem on top of the Eiffel Tower--"
Somehow, he had just enough wit to interrupt her, although his voice was a bit shaky as he spoke. "Really?" he asked, only half in jest. "I knew you were open-minded but... Jo, darling, I had no idea it stretched so far." He managed a small, tight smile and even a bit of speculation, trying to drive the specter of fear away. "Harems, you say, as though we were in desert lands. Speaking of outrageous pantaloons..."
She made a frustrated noise at the back of her long throat, knowing him enough to know when he ran from something. "They would never find your body if you tried for one now, my boy. Fair warning. And in any case--"
She took a deep breath, as if to stabilize herself, as though to hold herself up to something. And then her rough little hands came up to cup his face within them, her thumbs stroking his cheeks, and her eyes straying so close to his that he could see every little freckle and speck of color that anchored them clearly.
"No," she told him, and her hands were loving and firm on his bare skin, her voice alone enough to hold him to her closely. "No, I don't care what you did or how often you did it or even who you did it with. That knowledge means nothing to me. In my humble opinion, we've both acted for a very long time like lunatic idiots, and we've let happiness slip through our hands often enough already. I don't care about your past-- I simply care about you. I want you. I love you. And I don't care if you had mistresses from one end of the continent to the next while you were there. I don't want anything to come between us, ever again. So if you ever have the notion that I would think in the least poorly about you simply because of... of something you did in Europe when you were still running wild, I... I want you to stick it in the closest water-closet you can find because I. Simply. Do not. Care. About. Any. Such. Thing!"
If anyone would ever ask him every afterward why he loved her, he thought that this moment could serve as the perfect summary of who, what, when, and why he loved her. Why, with the best clarity.
After all, every time he felt he couldn’t love her more, Jo had a way of surprising him all the more sincerely.
And after her hands had fallen from his face and her eyes had fallen from his gaze, he traced the outline of her lips with his own fingertips and thought of everything he had learned about her recently. He thought of their worst fights, and that fire that came alive in her whenever she thought of new creative insights, and the way his old lovers would scoff if they ever ran into her on the streets. He thought of how he had discovered her strange, whistling snore after two nights by her side, and her perpetual grouchiness before tea time occurred, how his curls always seemed to tangle up with hers when they got up in the morning. He thought of how she would look a sight on his arms in a ball, and scandalize their high-and-might neighbors in Manhattan when they called, and raise their children to be just as she was-as wild, as raucous, as free.
And he thought of how many people there were that didn’t have what he had, and how he came so close to losing what he worked so hard for, and how lucky privileged he was to hold her now, over and above everything.
Laurie thought of all that and smiled and whispered, "I wasn't quite that terrible, Jo. I think you're letting that fine imagination of yours run away with you. And also, strangely enough, with me.”
“Oh?” she said, and her voice was soft enough to match his own, as soft as her hands as they settled on his collar and began to undo his tie slowly. “Well, I shall simply remind you, good sir, that since we have been wed and are soon to go to bed, I don’t anticipate either of us soon doing much running."
Her voice almost trembled on the last word, just as her hands minutely trembled against his body as she helped him pull his jacket away from his arms, her fingers tracing the lines of his strong shoulders as she set him free. But when she gazed at him afterwards, her eyes were bright and fierce and as intent as they had ever been, something in them that he could not dismiss, or even want to unsee.
“So," he murmured, and his own voice trembled as his eager hands settled on her shoulders, drawing her forward steadily. “So I'm assuming you'd like to occupy the night with a pastime far removed from reading?”
"Oh," she answered, blinking for a minute before it gave way to that irrepressible Jo March grin he had been in love with for over half a dozen years. "Well, I really was tempted by that suggestion, Teddy, but I have to admit... I think I've figured out an even better way to occupy your lips. Would you like to learn about more about it?"
He very much did, helped with the impetus of her suddenly fierce grip on his collar, nape and neck. And when her face tilted to allow him easy access to her lips, suddenly nothing else in the night mattered in the least.
Laurie had promised himself as far as back as during their courting that should he ever be privileged to touch Jo intimately, he would be a gentleman above and beyond all other things. He would only caress her after she had given her consent many times over, and be as gentle and considerate and patient a lover as she could possibly receive. His promise had been made with the best of intentions, and even as he held her maddeningly warm form to him now, he had wanted to follow his rules completely. And perhaps he could have if their kiss had remained as sweet and languid and exploratory as it had been at first, when she had moaned into his mouth and pressed herself forward, letting him tangle his hands within her hair and murmur hasty reassurances against her trembling jaw, doing his best to be steady and slow despite the way she kept urging his hand to her impossibly soft breast, as though to feel her restless heart beating.
He tried to be good, he truly did. But then there had been her greedy hands exploring under his rapidly unbuttoning shirt, her fingers moving feverishly on his chest until he felt all his nerve dance under her peripheries--
And then there had been her full breast in his hand, her nipple grinding against his thumb as she pushed herself to him, her darkish aureole nearly visible under her sheer clothing--
And then there had been her own mouth against his neck, her sharp teeth scraping hard against the skin there, her tongue working against him in time to his own harsh groans and thundering heart-beats--
And then there had been her hips grinding against his, his desire rising inescapably against the warmth she seemed to deliberately set against his lap, her heated weight nearly enough to make him lose his senses completely--
And soon enough after that, there had been her high, fluttering cries echoing through the room as he pressed his hungry lips against the peaks of her barely covered cleavage, and his hands snaked underneath the infuriating long hem-line of a night-gown that was not nearly hiked up high enough for his comfort, his fingers wanting, seeking, needing--
There had been all of that and soon enough, there was nothing in the world that was nearly as absorbing as what was underneath him now: the mingled brown and gold of her skin, the chestnut fan of loose, long hair, the snap of her teeth, the curl of her mouth, that little hollow of her throat that always seemed to flush when he pressed his face between her breasts and kissed ferociously--
Even if the world decided at this moment to burst into flames and burn to a cinder, he would have neglected it all for the feel of his skin upon hers as he sampled every region of her body by turn, as though to learn which part of her would shiver most intently at the touch of his tongue-what parts of her he could taunt with a touch and which needed real delicacy. After all, they had never had the chance to explore so much before, not ever, not even when they had escaped from her guardians' eyes for minutes and hours, mornings and evenings, whole summer days that would be spent loving and talking and touching. They had never enjoyed so much privacy or isolation, or had so little to fear from the outside world that often seemed willing to divide them completely.
And though some small voice in Laurie told him to go slowly in the midst of all this new freedom, to pace himself so as not to frighten her, he could not help the line of fire he kissed down her front, down her shuddering neck, down her full, warm breasts, down her boyish hips and her slender waist and the long line of her legs, cut off only by an increasingly useless gown and guided only by Jo's sighs and cries as she let him take from her a most indecent set of liberties.
He wanted her so badly he felt close to shattering, only a thin line of self-control keeping his lips from consuming her completely as they trailed down her half-bare thigh, his incisors grazing the pale skin there until she was bucking against teeth blindly, her hands on him nothing more than a blur of frenzied activity. He wanted her so badly he felt near insensible with longing, his hands holding her hips steady as he grazed her perilously close to her most intimate warmth, her little gasps and cries only making him tease her all the more intently. He wanted her so badly he could think of nothing but her pleasure, nothing but of their bodies together, nothing but weaving loose circles with his mouth around the very heart of her ardor, her last bit of beauty hidden from him by a trailing curtain of cotton that he ached to lift up.
Jo was wholly intoxicating in his arms, from the taste of her throat to the texture of her thigh, from the feel of her velvety breasts to the sounds of her sharp cries. She was both dream and fantasy, image and reality, and she made all of Laurie’s fervid imaginings from years past look like the stuff of schoolboy idiocy. She was enough to make him almost glad that he had practiced enough with the women in Europe to escape humiliating himself against her already.
He would have done anything to please her as much as she did for him now, to bring her to the same heights of wanting, feeling-- loving.
And given all that, it came as quite a shock when he took a momentarily rest from loving his wife completely to see that, far from urging him on any longer, she now had her eyes shut tightly as she held on to the sides of the settee and seemed to be preparing herself for something vastly, vastly terrifying.
***
Author's Note Heh. I don't think I've ever written a sex cliff-hanger before. That's certainly a new one for me!
In any case, please don't kill me for leaving Jo and Laurie hanging. They'll get back into the swing of things after Laurie has to educate her a little more on certain aspects of carnality. (Says the author as she gives an evil little giggle imagining it...) And now I'm curious to know from my readers... how did you like the salacious carnal bits of this chapter? Were they in character? Did they flow well with the general story of Jo and Laurie? Were they, erm, effective? I feel nervous desecrating great literature with sex scenes, although I admit that this one was sort of ridiculously fun to write, given the epic amounts of sexual tension between Jo and Laurie. Overall, do you want to see more of the same or do I need to make changes?
Thanks again for all your help! You are, I am convinced, the most attentive group of readers a person could go. Thanks again for such fine critique!
In any case, thanks again for all the lovely, lovely constructive reviews for chapter 3. They helped a ridiculous amount in fashioning my characterization for Laurie! Special thanks have to go to Dream's Sister, whose beautiful missives on Laurie helped with my break-through, and Elisabeth Harker, who actually helped me roleplay this and the follow chapter. Some of Jo's dialog comes straight from her mind and if you aren't reading her new fic, Braver Than We Are, you're missing out!
Thanks again and please drop a review if you liked the chapter. It really thrills me as both a writer and fangirl of the series. ;)
Title: A Night To Remember, Chapter 4
Fandom: Little Women
Series: A Night to Remember
Characters/Pairings: Jo/Laurie, Amy, Fred, Cast
Rating: Hard R This Chapter, Later NC-17
Summary: She had told him: "I can't betray my sister like this." And he had looked at her with those dark, frantic eyes and whispered: "You are going to be the death of me." Jo, Laurie, and what could have been and might still be.
Note: The long-promised sex finally rears its head in this chapter, albeit not all that explicitly as of yet. Beware delicate sensibilities!
***
Last Chapter:
And when he finally heard her call out his name from the midst of her inner chambers, Mr. Theodore Laurence smiled himself back to a state of apparent calm, smoothed back his dark curls, straightened his slightly creased shirt, and stepped to the doors that would shield them both from the eyes of the outside world during their first true night as married beings.
There were no complete endings possible with Jo, only grand new beginnings. And he meant to make this one as happy as possible, no matter what else might happen tonight or tomorrow or during all the rest of their years.
***
After all the epic waiting and reminiscing he had just been doing outside of his wife's hallowed wooden doors, Mr. Theodore Laurence would not have been in the least surprised if the doors has refused to budge when he rose up to open them, the night finding yet another way to impede his entry. But thankfully, to his nervous surprise and very real delight, they swung their way open easily enough at his light touch, as though they had been waiting more for him than the other way around. And when he finally stepped forward to commence on with that grand new beginning he had promised himself earlier, it felt as though nothing in the world could at last get in the way of his delight at being with his wife presently.
Inside the bedroom, it was very cozy and bright, with more candles casting their faint coronas than had been featured in the hall he had paced previously. Golden light shone upon the fine wood of the doors and furniture and floors, and collected in pools and puddles along the fine upholstery he had imported from Europe to make Jo's contortions during writing as easy as could be. And in the middle of all the careful splendor, sitting quite serenely at the long chaise settee he had chosen specifically for her fits of being literary, was Jo-- her pilgrim hands folded in her lap, her eyes gazing down at her knees, her remarkable face reflected in the simple but grand mirror before her as though it were all the world wanted to see.
The woman before him, the one he had wanted for all his adult life, was not and never would be anything near a beauty. Nothing about her suggested feminine charm or dazzling grace, and Laurie would not have dreamed of disgracing her by telling her falsehoods about her figure or her face that her clear eyes would see through with ease. There was nothing about her long nose or hollow cheeks, about her gangly form or strong chin, that would drive sensitive poets in Europe to rhapsodize about her face, as had happened so often to Amy. There was no secret indentation of beauty to her, and no hidden cache of seductive clarity; nothing that might lead her to suddenly pull down her hair and be alight with loveliness any more than he could place himself in front of a manuscript and show off some previously unknown genius is his being.
She was simply his wife, vibrant and tenacious and integral and fierce, all the loveliness in her buried beneath her skull where so many overlooked it easily.
She simply was what she was, and if she asked now, Laurie would have told her that she was the finest creature on the face of the earth, and the only one he'd ever want completely.
But Jo had never asked and would never ask, would never want or need such assurances about conforming to the standards of fine society. So instead of launching into raptures about what the light did to her collarbones or the reflections of her avian eyes, Laurie simply leaned against the door, put his sauciest grin forward, and tried not to let the sudden pooling of desire between his stomach and his spine take over the evening.
“I’m not interrupting the start of a brilliant play that will take the country enough by storm soon, am I?” he finally asked when he could trust himself to speak, hoping his playfulness would temporarily mute his wish to kiss a path of fire from her collarbone down. “Because if I am, Jo, you are perfectly free to tell me off. I wouldn’t keep any wife of mine from genius for all the riches in the world or all the jewels of Grand Pare'e.”
For a moment, he almost thought she might not have heard him, that his voice had given his secret wishes away by coming forth as too harsh, too openly wanting. But after another pensive moment of reflection, Jo seemed to shake off whatever had been keeping her a thousand miles away from her physical form and looked up, the martial light in her eyes sending another exquisite shiver of tension snaking through his body.
"Actually," she replied, smiling sweetly, "I was wondering if my reflection here wanted to partake in some droll conversation... but I suppose that can be put off for another day. Since you're here, I may as well reconsider in the hopes that you'll be even more interesting."
Laurie had never known another woman that could start off a conversation with such tart sweetness; had never wanted to know, even. He trod a few careful steps toward her, as carefully as a man entering a lion's den... a metaphor not quite as outlandish as it might seem, given the gleam of those thrilling eyes as they met his in the mirror.
Although with a bit of luck, a fate far better than being mauled and eaten was awaiting for him in her arms now.
...Not that he'd mind just a bit of mauling. Not from Jo, at least.
"Oh?" he answered, keeping his face composed as he wound his way to her slowly. "More interesting than a reflection, you say? Dear Jo, you may be overestimating me. What makes you think that in a moment, I won't be tongue-tied by your radiance or completely undone by the raptures inspired by your delicacy?"
She threw an arched eyebrow at him, and he wished he could place the tiny smile tugging at the corners of her mouth into his pocket and have it for keeps. "Besides my complete lack of either radiance or delicacy?"
Most would have granted her the point but he wasn't about to concede yet. Instead, with a thoughtful look on his face, he pressed onward. "You're much too hard on yourself," he told her, still drawing near inch by inch, though he strove to look as though he cared not at all about being closer to her summer dark skin. "I'd say you are more than radiant just now-- more like completely luminous. No, no, even more than that... surely there's an even better word to describe you at present…?"
That tiny smile of hers was now threatening to blossom and spill all over her face, to transform it in that way he loved so much and once tried so hard so desperately. "I'd suggest lunacy but that word might suit you much better, my boy. Have you gotten into the laudanum again recently?"
"It was only that one time," he murmured, pouting winsomely at her, only a few steps away now, so close he could smell the delicate perfume she had doused herself with for tonight, a hide-and-seek smell of expensive violets that must have been a well meaning wedding present. "And how was I supposed to know about my... sensitivity before hand? I thought I was merely taking enough to care for a cold. I have no idea such an innocent spoonful could make me so… unseemly."
Jo straightened before the mirror and smiled coyly, in that way that merely meant more teasing torment from her end. "Oh, don't worry, my boy, no one's blaming you. Although I expect my father could have lived many more years in his long and adventurous life without walking in on you chasing me all about our house rooms whilst wielding a very pretty pinafore in the most alarming way possible."
He couldn't help his laugh when he finally reached her, one hand descending down to toy with her long, chestnut curls, his merry eyes meeting hers with the aid of the vanity mirror before them both. "Indeed! Though I now wonder if I should be insulted that he first thought my drug-addled self was attempting to get you to help me model the pinafore on my own, instead of on your beauteous body?"
Instead of protesting his lavish praise of her, Jo settled for looking terrifyingly thoughtful, thus frightening him even more. "Wait. Was that truly the case? I really thought you had suddenly taken on another flight of fancy and wanted to play heroine in my recent story. Oh dear… no wonder my poor father spent the entire week after counseling on what to do should I find my garments stretched out in later years."
For a minute, his hands actually froze on her dark waves of hair, his horrified face only relenting when they met the laughing eyes set in her lilting reflection. “…Then no wonder he also kept trying to tug away all the ceremonial ribbons away from me when we were decorating from the wedding. I simply assumed at the time that he thought I had atrocious taste!”
“But you do,” Jo pointed out, sensibly. “After all, you did choose me over Amy. Although personally, I wouldn’t terribly mind some new-found predilection for pinafores on your part. It wouldn’t do me any harm and in any case, it would make you all the more flexible when I need someone to read out a few lines from a play. Although I assume my father-and probably Marmee and Meg and John as well by now-may feel quite differently.”
With a groan, Laurie sank down to kiss the soft mass of hair at the back of his wife's head, drowning his humiliation in the tide of her sudden, warm laughter. "You do my masculinity great injustice, my darling. And now I’m not sure I’ll ever be able to see your family again without turning red in the face.”
“I think you exaggerate a bit,” Jo pointed out sensibly, one of her hands lifting up to pat his shoulder comfortably. “It’s true that Amy will always rue the fact that she almost married you and Aunt March has sworn she will never again see you and my father thinks you may have a few… er… interesting habits in the bedroom…”
“Habits?” Laurie muttered from his comfortable perch buried into her shoulder. “As in more than one? As in, at least two?!”
His wife coughed a bit, never a good sign. “You, ah, you shouldn’t worry about that so very much, Teddy. We’ve finally married so there’s not much he can say now about your purported predilection for women who cut a fine figure in pirate-themed pantaloons. I mean, as long as you keep said predilection confined to me, of course. He was already touchy over you, ehm, ‘deserting’ Amy. If he thought you were ready to do the same to me, war’s end or no, he’d probably take his old bayonet and run you right through.”
There was a long and terrible silence for a while, as Laurie’s mind processed that image with regrettable detail.
“Jo,” he finally said, in a tone of terrible and only half-feigned sadness, “when I am finally confined to a sanatorium because of you, my only satisfaction will be knowing that you will always be close at hand. Possibly in the very next room.”
She had the gall- he was currently refusing to admit it charmed him completely-to throw her long neck back and laugh. “Oh, Teddy, you are quite the romantic. European suites are not enough for us-we must have matching lunatic cells for two!”
Laurie laughed as well and then surfaced from the waterfall of her hair, his glittering eyes meeting her warm ones in the mirror once more. “When you put it like that, it doesn’t seem so terrible a deal. And even if you do eventually drive me mad, they do say the lunatic and the lover are one and the same. So now I must ask: given your predilection for plays, which would you rather have me be tonight? I remain ever your humble servant, willing to do whatever it is that you’d like me to."
Laurie had thought it a simple enough question when rehearsing it in his head before time, a way to gently let Jo know that he would follow her lead for tonight and allow her to decide whether to pursue or leave off intimacy for now. But instead of bantering back with one of her fierce, funny jabs, he actually felt Jo startle beneath his tender hands and throat, like a bird that had suddenly had its comfortable perch yanked from below. It was enough to make him still as well, and when his eyes again met hers in her silvered mirror, there was something dark and uncertain lurking beneath her brow as she carefully made out her next words.
"I..." she began, and her brown throat had to work too long and hard before she could muster her answer and decide her course. "I mean... simply... honestly, Teddy, sometimes I don't even understand those slippery words of yours. Sometimes I wish I could take that tongue of yours and wring out all its secrets. What could you possibly mean? What shall I order you toward?"
It was enough to make him falter as well, the soothing words about relaxing and easing into their new privacy deserting him when her vaguely panicked eyes met his and made his ears begin to burn. "Ah, well, simply that... I mean, I wanted you to decide what we would do tonight since this is, after all, our first night in real privacy, and I know that you're, probably, not all that used to, perhaps being with, well, someone else in this... sort of situation... currently..."
It was enough to make Jo’s summer tanned face turned a swift and merciless shade reminiscent of tomato paste, and enough to make Laurie curse the way he had fumbled the delicate situation so far. Jo usually took to change about as well as a nunnery took to a horde of marauding Vikings, and though she had permitted-- even encouraged!-- him to take certain liberties with her physical virtue in the past, she had been more than capable of pushing him away as well. And though their conversations could be nigh legendary is scope, neither of them had ever had the nerve to actually sit down and talk about their past lovers-or lack thereof - honestly. To be honest, Laurie did not even know if Jo was a virgin, or even if she wanted to make love to him. It was all a tangle to understand how she felt about intimacy, given how she seemed to sometimes do her deliberate best to drive him mad with desire... and at other times, seemed gun-shy of the topic entirely.
At least for now, she was far more the latter than the former, the flush on her face spreading down the arc of her neck and the lines of her collar to grace the curved top of her-- God, that nightgown was so filmy in the light it was practically indecent, not that he minded greatly. It took an enormous exertion of willpower for Laurie to force himself to look away from the arresting sight before him and back to her face, especially when Jo began to speak once more, her voice strangely quivery. "Oh! You mean if... if we should... be as... husband and wife... should be... as indeed we are... currently..."
He would have teased her about the way her grasp of the English language has seemingly deserted her, only it was difficult to speak when his own paralyzing fear of somehow mucking up an otherwise splendid night had him by the throat swiftly. It was, in fact, a throat he had to clear several times so that he wouldn't squeak out his next few words like a half-grown boy who still hadn't figured out how to approach the fascinating girl who lived next door. "Well. Well, yes. But of course-- only if you should want to! After all, we could do... so much else. Like read aloud to one another. As married people so often do."
There was a long and terrible silence for quite a time afterward. And if Laurie could have, he would have stepped outside the scene just then and slapped his own self upside the head for sounding like such a perfect fool. It was lovely how he had made them go from being a freshly married couple in the first flush of their life into a pair married into their dotage years, waiting for death and whiling away the time by knitting, twitting and piously reading whatever religious books they could still view.
Given all that, he couldn't blame Jo for looking at him quite dubiously, although at least she did so through the mirror, which cut down on the hideous embarrassment he felt slightly. "...Really?” she enquired at last. “Read aloud to each other? Is... that quite the thing that young men in the private company of young women very often like to do?"
Knowing very well what young men in the private company of young women mostly liked to do, himself very much not presently excluded, Laurie proceeded to lie as convincingly as he could. "Yes. Of course! I know... many young married couples who proceed to do just that with each other in Europe. Especially when they... ah... wish to put each other... ehm... at ease... and chase away their first few hours of… er… doom and gloom…"
He didn't trust the slight, wicked smile that was beginning to steal over his wife's warm face. "I'm not judging, my boy. Because if that is..."
(Oh, he could not believe she would stoop to teasing him at a time like this, when his blush was nearly as ferocious as hers. Jo truly never did let up with the teasing.)
(Not that he’d ever want her to, really.)
She was actually smirking a little as she went on, though her face was still flushed enough so that she wouldn't meet his gaze. "If it is, I imagine I don't have nearly as much to worry about in terms of your past as I did previously. Reading. Hmmm..."
Laurie wasted another few minutes with more fiendish embarrassment, pathetically wondering how anyone in the Laurence bloodline had managed to run a successful business empire if they had a brain anywhere near his. In fact, he only put himself together when he saw her blush beginning to fade a bit and he found the courage to roguishly answer. " Oh, believe me, Jo, you've got plenty to worry about while trying to harness me in the direction of general respectability. I wouldn’t let those worries fade away quite so soon!"
That made the dying flush on her face rise again, although he suspected at least some of it stemmed from a source quite opposed to anger. After all, though her mouth remained prim as she made out her next few words, it threatened to break out in a smile periodically. "Oh, is harnessing you now my primary occupation? I think I may have let myself in for far more trouble than any respectable woman ought to see."
And though he knew it was conceding their little game, he had to break the role to laugh and swoop down once more to kiss the part in her hair at her playful words, trying not to dizzy himself in the smell of her skin, sweet beyond the perfume fumes. She always tried so hard to forgive him, to smooth over the past that he wanted to forget and erase from her view.
His own words, when he could assemble them, were as light as he could manage. "Oh, probably. I hoped you enjoyed our complicated courtship, dear, because I shall only become a far more irritating presence in your life from here!"
Her words were nearly as dry as her gaze, as she pretended that she hadn’t seen his slight, temporary break. "Oh, trust me. Women everywhere, married or otherwise, know that about men already. Why do you think I stayed a spinster so long?"
He gave her another winsome smile for playing along, with some roguish self-assurance added for taste. "Your tragic lack of one Theodore Laurence in your life?"
"I shall," she announced primly, "let you go on believing that if it helps you sleep at night easily. The things I do for you."
It was enough to make Laurie laugh once more, as much in relief as anything else, feeling something warm in him as he saw the genuine pleasure that flooded her face at his own soothed feeling. And as soon as he saw that she was more at ease than she had been previously, the flush dying down on her cheeks and her eyes meeting his once more, he finally lay down on the long settee beside her, their hands once again entwining.
Jo looked almost impossibly welcoming when he was this close, her skin looking as though it was lit from within, and her lips so tempting it was all he could do to keep himself from claiming them instantly. In her spotless white gown, smelling of ink and rare flowers, she could have been an wild angel, or a heathen priestess, or a supernatural parlor trick, though the reality of her made all those other possibilities pale and melt away. And when he spoke again, it was only after he had lifted one of her long, work-scuffed hands to his lips, savoring the sight of her gray eyes widening as he languidly kissed her writerly calluses.
"As long as I can go to bed next to you, dear Jo, even your flying nocturnal elbows would not disturb my nightly peace. And what do you mean about worrying about my past? I hope..."
He hadn’t meant to sound self-conscious-- in fact, even as he tilted a charming smile at her, hoped ferociously so that that was not the case. But he couldn't quite help the neediness that found its way in regardless, even despite his continual efforts to stamp it out, to cut and burn it away from him, to disassociate entirely.
Jo didn't need to know this was him, or a part of him. She didn't need to see him as he was, rather than as he wanted to be.
He was going to be a better man for her. He had promised her that. In her eyes, the only eyes that mattered in the world, he couldn’t afford to be weak.
So Laurie stumbled on, his charm clinging precariously, even as his words stuck to his throat as he muddled through linguistically. "I mean, I hope you do not feel as though I am somehow..."
Tainted. Or disgraced. Or simply disgusting. Not that he deserved to be known as any better, any more than he deserved the woman sitting next to him now, her eyes clear and her mind spotless, her hands clean of hurt brought to so many innocent others who had had the ill luck to stumble on him when he had done his best to commit social suicide slowly.
He didn't deserve her, or anything of her. And for all the reconciling that they had done, there was some small, terrible part of him that still feared that one day she would understand as much and walk away, knowing that the dictates of society would mean nothing when it came to her conscience and moral clarity.
She could still leave him for all that he’d done. And no reasonable person on the face of earth would blame her for it either.
However, those thoughts of his were swept away in another moment, as his Jo straightened once more in her seat and brought both of her small, firm hands up to cup his own, her eyes wide and honest as it took in his sudden flicker of fear. "No! No, no, and a thousand times no! You don't even have to fill in those blanks-- I can see them written all over your face. No, Teddy, I don't care in the least about what you did in Europe, or even who you did it with. I wouldn't care if you had-- had-- I don't know-- installed a harem on top of the Eiffel Tower--"
Somehow, he had just enough wit to interrupt her, although his voice was a bit shaky as he spoke. "Really?" he asked, only half in jest. "I knew you were open-minded but... Jo, darling, I had no idea it stretched so far." He managed a small, tight smile and even a bit of speculation, trying to drive the specter of fear away. "Harems, you say, as though we were in desert lands. Speaking of outrageous pantaloons..."
She made a frustrated noise at the back of her long throat, knowing him enough to know when he ran from something. "They would never find your body if you tried for one now, my boy. Fair warning. And in any case--"
She took a deep breath, as if to stabilize herself, as though to hold herself up to something. And then her rough little hands came up to cup his face within them, her thumbs stroking his cheeks, and her eyes straying so close to his that he could see every little freckle and speck of color that anchored them clearly.
"No," she told him, and her hands were loving and firm on his bare skin, her voice alone enough to hold him to her closely. "No, I don't care what you did or how often you did it or even who you did it with. That knowledge means nothing to me. In my humble opinion, we've both acted for a very long time like lunatic idiots, and we've let happiness slip through our hands often enough already. I don't care about your past-- I simply care about you. I want you. I love you. And I don't care if you had mistresses from one end of the continent to the next while you were there. I don't want anything to come between us, ever again. So if you ever have the notion that I would think in the least poorly about you simply because of... of something you did in Europe when you were still running wild, I... I want you to stick it in the closest water-closet you can find because I. Simply. Do not. Care. About. Any. Such. Thing!"
If anyone would ever ask him every afterward why he loved her, he thought that this moment could serve as the perfect summary of who, what, when, and why he loved her. Why, with the best clarity.
After all, every time he felt he couldn’t love her more, Jo had a way of surprising him all the more sincerely.
And after her hands had fallen from his face and her eyes had fallen from his gaze, he traced the outline of her lips with his own fingertips and thought of everything he had learned about her recently. He thought of their worst fights, and that fire that came alive in her whenever she thought of new creative insights, and the way his old lovers would scoff if they ever ran into her on the streets. He thought of how he had discovered her strange, whistling snore after two nights by her side, and her perpetual grouchiness before tea time occurred, how his curls always seemed to tangle up with hers when they got up in the morning. He thought of how she would look a sight on his arms in a ball, and scandalize their high-and-might neighbors in Manhattan when they called, and raise their children to be just as she was-as wild, as raucous, as free.
And he thought of how many people there were that didn’t have what he had, and how he came so close to losing what he worked so hard for, and how lucky privileged he was to hold her now, over and above everything.
Laurie thought of all that and smiled and whispered, "I wasn't quite that terrible, Jo. I think you're letting that fine imagination of yours run away with you. And also, strangely enough, with me.”
“Oh?” she said, and her voice was soft enough to match his own, as soft as her hands as they settled on his collar and began to undo his tie slowly. “Well, I shall simply remind you, good sir, that since we have been wed and are soon to go to bed, I don’t anticipate either of us soon doing much running."
Her voice almost trembled on the last word, just as her hands minutely trembled against his body as she helped him pull his jacket away from his arms, her fingers tracing the lines of his strong shoulders as she set him free. But when she gazed at him afterwards, her eyes were bright and fierce and as intent as they had ever been, something in them that he could not dismiss, or even want to unsee.
“So," he murmured, and his own voice trembled as his eager hands settled on her shoulders, drawing her forward steadily. “So I'm assuming you'd like to occupy the night with a pastime far removed from reading?”
"Oh," she answered, blinking for a minute before it gave way to that irrepressible Jo March grin he had been in love with for over half a dozen years. "Well, I really was tempted by that suggestion, Teddy, but I have to admit... I think I've figured out an even better way to occupy your lips. Would you like to learn about more about it?"
He very much did, helped with the impetus of her suddenly fierce grip on his collar, nape and neck. And when her face tilted to allow him easy access to her lips, suddenly nothing else in the night mattered in the least.
Laurie had promised himself as far as back as during their courting that should he ever be privileged to touch Jo intimately, he would be a gentleman above and beyond all other things. He would only caress her after she had given her consent many times over, and be as gentle and considerate and patient a lover as she could possibly receive. His promise had been made with the best of intentions, and even as he held her maddeningly warm form to him now, he had wanted to follow his rules completely. And perhaps he could have if their kiss had remained as sweet and languid and exploratory as it had been at first, when she had moaned into his mouth and pressed herself forward, letting him tangle his hands within her hair and murmur hasty reassurances against her trembling jaw, doing his best to be steady and slow despite the way she kept urging his hand to her impossibly soft breast, as though to feel her restless heart beating.
He tried to be good, he truly did. But then there had been her greedy hands exploring under his rapidly unbuttoning shirt, her fingers moving feverishly on his chest until he felt all his nerve dance under her peripheries--
And then there had been her full breast in his hand, her nipple grinding against his thumb as she pushed herself to him, her darkish aureole nearly visible under her sheer clothing--
And then there had been her own mouth against his neck, her sharp teeth scraping hard against the skin there, her tongue working against him in time to his own harsh groans and thundering heart-beats--
And then there had been her hips grinding against his, his desire rising inescapably against the warmth she seemed to deliberately set against his lap, her heated weight nearly enough to make him lose his senses completely--
And soon enough after that, there had been her high, fluttering cries echoing through the room as he pressed his hungry lips against the peaks of her barely covered cleavage, and his hands snaked underneath the infuriating long hem-line of a night-gown that was not nearly hiked up high enough for his comfort, his fingers wanting, seeking, needing--
There had been all of that and soon enough, there was nothing in the world that was nearly as absorbing as what was underneath him now: the mingled brown and gold of her skin, the chestnut fan of loose, long hair, the snap of her teeth, the curl of her mouth, that little hollow of her throat that always seemed to flush when he pressed his face between her breasts and kissed ferociously--
Even if the world decided at this moment to burst into flames and burn to a cinder, he would have neglected it all for the feel of his skin upon hers as he sampled every region of her body by turn, as though to learn which part of her would shiver most intently at the touch of his tongue-what parts of her he could taunt with a touch and which needed real delicacy. After all, they had never had the chance to explore so much before, not ever, not even when they had escaped from her guardians' eyes for minutes and hours, mornings and evenings, whole summer days that would be spent loving and talking and touching. They had never enjoyed so much privacy or isolation, or had so little to fear from the outside world that often seemed willing to divide them completely.
And though some small voice in Laurie told him to go slowly in the midst of all this new freedom, to pace himself so as not to frighten her, he could not help the line of fire he kissed down her front, down her shuddering neck, down her full, warm breasts, down her boyish hips and her slender waist and the long line of her legs, cut off only by an increasingly useless gown and guided only by Jo's sighs and cries as she let him take from her a most indecent set of liberties.
He wanted her so badly he felt close to shattering, only a thin line of self-control keeping his lips from consuming her completely as they trailed down her half-bare thigh, his incisors grazing the pale skin there until she was bucking against teeth blindly, her hands on him nothing more than a blur of frenzied activity. He wanted her so badly he felt near insensible with longing, his hands holding her hips steady as he grazed her perilously close to her most intimate warmth, her little gasps and cries only making him tease her all the more intently. He wanted her so badly he could think of nothing but her pleasure, nothing but of their bodies together, nothing but weaving loose circles with his mouth around the very heart of her ardor, her last bit of beauty hidden from him by a trailing curtain of cotton that he ached to lift up.
Jo was wholly intoxicating in his arms, from the taste of her throat to the texture of her thigh, from the feel of her velvety breasts to the sounds of her sharp cries. She was both dream and fantasy, image and reality, and she made all of Laurie’s fervid imaginings from years past look like the stuff of schoolboy idiocy. She was enough to make him almost glad that he had practiced enough with the women in Europe to escape humiliating himself against her already.
He would have done anything to please her as much as she did for him now, to bring her to the same heights of wanting, feeling-- loving.
And given all that, it came as quite a shock when he took a momentarily rest from loving his wife completely to see that, far from urging him on any longer, she now had her eyes shut tightly as she held on to the sides of the settee and seemed to be preparing herself for something vastly, vastly terrifying.
***
Author's Note Heh. I don't think I've ever written a sex cliff-hanger before. That's certainly a new one for me!
In any case, please don't kill me for leaving Jo and Laurie hanging. They'll get back into the swing of things after Laurie has to educate her a little more on certain aspects of carnality. (Says the author as she gives an evil little giggle imagining it...) And now I'm curious to know from my readers... how did you like the salacious carnal bits of this chapter? Were they in character? Did they flow well with the general story of Jo and Laurie? Were they, erm, effective? I feel nervous desecrating great literature with sex scenes, although I admit that this one was sort of ridiculously fun to write, given the epic amounts of sexual tension between Jo and Laurie. Overall, do you want to see more of the same or do I need to make changes?
Thanks again for all your help! You are, I am convinced, the most attentive group of readers a person could go. Thanks again for such fine critique!