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You’re surprised at how little she’s surprised.
You’ve been feeling each other out for months now - a process started back in your first few days of renewed consciousness, on that first strange, sad date, watching the sun, considering the luck and the disaster of being just far enough from a star not to burn, just close enough not to freeze.
It’s been less metaphysical since then. You’ve run into each other when you’re in Martinaise, working joint precinct homicide investigations with Kim. Flirted wryly and awkwardly. Felt what you felt when you first met her - a sense of someone else who’s been touched by time and loss, in ways that lead to large, stubborn, difficult thoughts that often remain unshared. Thoughts that make the world expansive and gray, with strange edges and moments of light, like the sea.
She has a sharp sense of humor that twists. Eyes that see you for what you are, someone trying to find a place in the storm. Not beside another person, but within yourself.
You walk together. You share moments in the spring, talking about Martinaise and Revachol and the mundane details of life. You talk about what politics are like seen from the distance of lives that have never been to the top of a skyscraper or stood in a penthouse apartment or had any faith that old age means anything but the world not caring as you lose the ability to fight for your own survival.
She stands with you and Kim as you put flowers at the site where your MC has finally disappeared beneath the water, and you all say a few words about the self we place into objects and how we lay to rest past selves and dreams and aspirations as we abandon objects and they abandon us. (Okay, Kim mostly just stands by with his hands behind his back, a slight smile at the corners of his mouth and in his eyes. He did bring along a pair of worn driver’s gloves to offer to the sea, though. You wanted to ask about them but just barely held yourself back.)
You eat sandwiches and ice cream and chips together. You throw popcorn to (and at) seagulls.
She tells you about her children and about men and fishing and Martinaise, and you listen. You tell her about the phasmid and figuring out what your favorite snack foods are and Precinct 41, and she listens.
You try hauling in fish and utterly fail. But you still enjoy it. You also both get very wet. You try a number of times over a number of months. You still get very wet.
You have very few expectations of each other. You don’t build up mental fantasy partners, imagine futures or events or moments that could happen, that must happen to make yours a Real Relationship, to prove Love or Desirability. That’s not what this is about. You take pleasure in each other’s company as it comes. If there are strings attached, they are gentle.
So of course she wasn’t surprised. She had no secret mental image of you to break when you told her.
You still can’t believe it.
She’s beneath you in the rickety bed in the shack by the sea. It is winter again, and outside the cold is biting and white. In this room, it is warm.
She is warm. She is also beautiful in a way that you fight not to worship. Her short, dark hair feathers out on the ancient pillow. Her dark eyes meet yours, and there is heat in them, but it is patient and self-aware, a slow, constant burn. Amused, but not mocking. (She has something in common with Kim, that way, you find yourself thinking, for the barest second. Though there is no fear in her eyes that allowing her amusement to be seen might not be quite appropriate.)
Her hands are rough. Her skin is smooth in a way that shocks sense memories from you, shuddering and intense but mercifully outline-less. You run your hands over her. She has stretch marks; she has scars. An intricate compass rose tattooed just above the cup of one hip. (That’s a painful place for tattoos; was that something she dared herself to do when she was young, or something endured later in life, when decisions rest on history and experiences?)
Your mouth is on hers, the wet sucking heat there an echo of similar heat below. You taste her throat, her breasts, her nipples, her navel (you blow into it, making a potentially mood-breaking explosive flatulent noise; she laughs and smacks you, and the mood holds up just fine), the soft skin below her navel and above the curls of her pubic hair. The insides of her calves. You leave careful bite marks that fade and disappear back into the color of her skin, harmlessly.
You get down to her feet and lick the sole of one, which makes her squirm and laugh again and inform you she’d been walking barefoot earlier and accidentally stepped on a few very dead, very old bait fish.
You move back up and begin to massage the crux of her body, between her legs, the softness below the tightly curled dark hair. Slide one finger into her. Another.
You have an advantage here. It may be decades since anyone saw you as anything but a man, but you have personal experience in this area that few men have. You know how this feels from the other side - an approximation, perhaps, a feeling that you’re trying to manage something that isn’t quite right, that’s expected from you, that will never quite open up the expanding soft focus that you see in Lilienne’s eyes now. (You don't quite remember these things, but you know them.)
You set a pace, but you don’t stick to it religiously. This is the fun part, the part you wish you could always experience in a different, more intense way. Wish you could experience with your orgasm building along with hers, within hers, within her need. Still, fingers have their advantages. Exquisite control, a bit of sensory distance. Urgency doesn’t drive urgency, with fingers. You slow down, you speed up, push deeper or more lightly, add another finger, lean in to lick up along the folds of her.
Her body tightens around your fingers, and you know you’re almost there. You slow down, pull your fingers back slightly, but you don’t stop what you’re doing with your tongue. She makes a sound that’s not so much erotic as somewhere between frustrated and exasperated and reaches down to wrap her fingers in your hair and pull.
Okay, okay! Fingers again it is. Just a bit. Slowly. Faster. Feeling that clenching pressure building, spasming tighter and tighter to its highest intensity. There. The hard grip of the last pulse, the final tensing of her body. The slack falling back after.
Now, here’s where it’s both incredibly frustrating and not entirely a bad thing, having a body that’s not all in keeping with what your mind and your desires need and want.
Because strap-ons? They can stay erect for the long game. And yours has been waiting in the--uh. In the wings? (Thank god it doesn’t talk, or it would be giving you suggestions for better figures of speech right now.)
You slip your fingers back into her, begin the rhythm again. With your other hand, you fumble for the small bottle of lube that hasn’t quite fallen off the side of the bed yet. You stroke lube up and down the silicone of your erection.
It’s not the same as what you imagine it could be. You won’t feel the clench and pulse of her around this as you did around your fingers. You won't be allowed a mirror of that deep tension and release you feel and see in her, that brings heat to your body and a gripping yearning need into your chest and throat and heart and mind that you can’t quite resolve, that could kill you with frustration if just seeing the deep pleasure you can bring to her wasn’t just (almost) enough to make up for it all.
You don’t remember when the last time you did this was. (You don’t want to remember.)
But you are thrilled to discover that you are (still?) good at it.
And thrilled to discover that with her.