Chapter Text
It should be said that Lauren Sinclair looked particularly radiant in white.
They had scarcely reached the threshold of the bedroom before his hands were on her shoulders, backing her flush against the door, his lips needling at her throat. When she sighed, it washed over the top of his bowed head like a balmy breeze.
“You’re awfully impatient, Mr. White,” she chided, tipping her head back against the doorframe. Her fingertips slipped underneath his coat and curled around what she presumed would soon be a thoroughly-rumpled tunic, drawing him closer to her in spite of her protests.
“I’ve been very patient, Mrs. White,” Kieran replied hoarsely against her neck. “Exceedingly so.” His lips steadfastly drifted upwards, peppering kisses up the gentle curve of her throat, her chin, the harsh line of her jaw. “Do you know how difficult it is to focus on anything beyond kissing you when you’re looking like this?”
He drew back to appraise her fully. His wife looked the perfect picture of a blushing bride, which was somewhat amusing, being that demure was certainly not among the first adjectives he’d use to describe her. She was softened in the candlelight, her lips parted in breathlessness, quirked into a whisper of an impish grin.
Lauren cocked one brow into her hairline. “Is that so? I suppose it is only fair, then, being that you insisted on a traditional wedding ceremony while I was perfectly happy to elope.”
“You’ll have blame Mrs. Hawkes for that,” he replied pointedly. “I have never seen my sister so utterly consumed with anything as she was with planning our wedding.”
“I wonder how she will fill her days now that it’s over,” Lauren murmured thoughtfully.
“Vexing Mr. Hawkes, no doubt,” Kieran replied. “It is perhaps the only activity she enjoys more than meddling in the lives of others.”
“Only slightly,” she laughed in response.
Kieran returned his lips to hers with more fervor, tracing the damp plane of her flushed mouth under his own with a sort of reverent intensity, as though internalizing the memory so that he could call upon it later. He was numbly aware of his coat falling to the floor, though he couldn’t place who was responsible for its removal; they moved as one, hands worrying at belt buckles and buttons, lips and teeth and tongues that had neither a fixed beginning nor end, for they moved within one another as confidently as though they shared the same consciousness.
“Bed,” she panted, drawing back only when the risk of hypoxia overwhelmed her want.
“Bossy,” Kieran replied. And then he swept her into his arms — no small feat, given the yards of tulle presently adorning her skirts — and promptly tossed her onto the duvet. He snorted at the petulant little yelp she gave, for it was both so very unlike her in disposition and breathlessly endearing all the same. “Who on earth decided to put you in so much bloody fabric? It’ll take ages to get this off.”
“That’s rather presumptuous, Mr. White,” Lauren commented, leaning forward to loosen his cravat. “Who’s to say you’ll see me without it?”
“Ah,” he murmured, lifting her knuckles to his lips and kissing them. “Yes, how could I have presumed such a thing?”
“Preposterous,” she agreed breathlessly.
“Although…” Kieran leaned forward, caging her on either side with his kneecaps. He inclined his head, now close enough to kiss her, if only he dipped his chin just so. “I do recall you were the one who demanded that I take you to bed.”
“Demanded?” She scoffed, as though she considered the notion patently ridiculous. “I hardly — ah.” His tongue darted out to trace the dip in her clavicle, just above the neckline of her wedding gown, and then she evidently stopped thinking entirely.
When Kieran undressed her, he did so slowly, meticulously, with both his hands and his lips, tracing the curves and divots and edges along the soft planes of her skin. He was desperate to commit this to memory: His wife on their wedding night, flushed and mewling and half-wild with want beneath him, his name resting on her lips like a wine stain.
When they were finally together as one, it happened quickly, which was fitting, perhaps, being that he couldn’t recall a time before loving her. He knew only in the delirious, sprawling after, the point where he was already within the throes of it. “Beautiful,” he murmured. He rocked his hips back and then fell into her like a cresting wave, helpless to her gravity. “Perfect.”
Lauren wove her fingers through his dampened hair, watching him with through hooded lids, drunk on the precipice of release. “I love you,” she whispered. He leaned down and captured the shape of the words in his mouth, wishing she’d say them again and never stop.
Kieran increased his pace when she moved more urgently against him, curling her slender fists in the bedsheets, panting her desire against the curve of his ear. She drifted her palms along the shifting muscles at his back in a lilting circuit, carving little half-moon divots into his shoulder caps when her pleasure threatened to overcome her. Kieran reciprocated by taking her lip between his teeth and nipping on the tender, kiss-swollen skin. He felt her accompanying moan everywhere, as though he’d been submerged within it.
Her mouth curled around the shape of a pleading whimper, but no sound came out. She tilted her head back, the whites of her eyes gleaming in the flickering candlelight, twin beacons guiding him directly to her.
“What do you need?” He growled, taking fistfuls of her soft hips and drawing her further into him, canting her just slightly off of the bed.
She was babbling, inarticulate, desperate. He knew that they yearned for the same fragmented wishes,shards of painted glass that only created a complete image when slotted together. For they had always been the end to the other’s means, the fragment completing the sentence the other hadn’t known how to finish, the thought previously thought inarticulable before they’d heard it on the other’s lips.
The end came in unison, in gentle harmony. It was her name on his lips and his lips at her neck, poised just over the hollow of her throat like an X on a treasure map. It was their fingers intertwined tightly, as though pressing the moment between their palms like a moth in resin. It was something old and unspeakable by name, a pleasure only articulable in a language long-since defunct.
Kieran drew her to his chest as they lay panting, evening their breaths until they were synchronized. In his breathless gratitude, he pressed a clumsy, open-mouthed kiss against the smooth cap of her shoulder.
Lauren rolled over to face him, the curve of her willowy silhouette brushed with dusky, flickering light. Her eyes were closed, but he knew that she hadn’t quite crossed the precipice of sleep yet. “How foolish we were,” she murmured, her voice thick with sleep. “For so very long.”
“Ah,” Kieran sighed, smoothing her rumpled hair behind her ear. “I dare say that the journey wouldn’t have been half as interesting, had we not been.”
She popped one eye open, assessing him wryly. “Oh?”
“Of course. I will fondly recount the memory of the first time my wife professed her love to me, only to then state that she was doing so against her better judgement—”
Lauren sat up with a groan, muffling his words under her hand. “Don’t speak of that day.”
Kieran chuckled through the gaps in her fingers. “We came around in the end, did we not?” He pried her hand off of his face and leaned up on his elbows, peering at her with gentle amusement. “For I would not have thought it possible to feel such incandescent happiness, and I will spend a lifetime experiencing it with you. If that does not make me the luckiest man on earth, I cannot think of what does.”
She smiled softly. “If that is the case, Mr. White,” she replied, “Then I suppose it’s all just as well.”
He took her face in his hands and kissed her lips.
“Just as well.”