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Pet names, to Stede, had always felt like an obligation. Of course he’d call his wife darling; that was expected of him, or at least what he expected of himself since he refused to be the cold and distant type his father was. Not to say he didn’t feel some sort of fondness for Mary at times, simply because she was the only person in his life outside of his mother and father. He did. It was never like that , though. They’d always felt automatic. Hollow. Performing a role was probably the most apt description.
With Ed? It feels right. Like he should have been saying it for weeks now. Months. Saying it feels like it has a purpose, even if the consonants fall a bit clumsy from his mouth as he follows the lead Ed had given him on the beach. Babe. That’s a good one, right? When Ed had called him that his heart had gotten all fluttery and he’d felt like he could float right off into the sky. If he felt like that, it had to be right.
And the way it sounds, the way Ed smiles at him in the soft golden light of their new beginning, solidifies what Stede already knew: that this was where he was meant to be, and who he was meant to be with.
Still, as they extinguish the lamps for the night and curl up together on the mattress on the floor, Stede can’t help but feel like something was missing in the soft slant of Ed’s mouth.
——
“Good morning, my love.”
The sun shines in at just the right angle to slant alluringly over the bed, treating Stede to the sight of Ed slowly blinking open his eyes with an adorable furrow between his brows. His hair is a wild nest. His face is mashed into the pillow, and he lets out a little groan as he stretches one leg, then the other. “Time izzit?”
“Hm.” That’s a good question. It’s difficult to really calculate without properly peering outside, and Stede doesn’t want to look away from the vision in front of him. “Nine, I think?”
Ed groans again and buries his face back into the pillow. “Too early,” he says, muffled. Which is funny, considering on the Revenge Ed was up with the sun, and oftentimes before it, when it was still just a promise on the inky horizon.
Retirement looks good on him, Stede thinks. It’s only been a few days, but already Ed’s posture is looser, his smiles freer. Some of the tightness of his mouth has softened, too. It’s like he’s shed his old skin, left it crumpled up someplace to rot in the woods behind their house. The Ed in its place is shiny-pink and tender, unscarred by what is now behind him.
Stede smiles fondly. He reaches out, strokes along Ed’s hair. The mattress creaks its protest as he shifts his weight. Ed’s beard looks almost white in this light. The marks of age on his face are stark. Stede can’t believe how lucky he is to have Ed right now, at this point in their lives. So many people search their entire lives for this and never find it. Now it’s in Stede’s bed, bare brown shoulder with its dark tattoos peeking above the blanket.
“A bit of a lie-in, then, I think,” says Stede, running the backs of his knuckles across the arch of Ed’s cheek before sliding back down and scooting in close. The space beneath the blanket smells like sleep and sweat and Ed. Its warmth calls to him, already making his eyelids heavy despite the blaze of sun across the bed.
Being able to take their time, lie in bed while the sun crawls higher over them, is a novelty for sure. Strange, though, how Stede, a man used to a life of leisure before the sea, has to readjust. He’s begun thinking of himself as two people: Stede Before Ed, and Stede After Ed. He thinks that Stede Before Ed would still be chasing something if they had never met. A beacon always in his heart, pointing someplace unknown. Seeking endlessly, traversing the world like a ghost.
——
Ed is the one to say baby first. He says it while riding Stede’s cock, the lantern light haloing his body. His hair, loose and swaying, sticks to his neck and shoulders in places with sweat. He moans, and he pants, and he says, “Stede, baby, there, you feel so good, ” and Stede feels the praise from crown to sole.
It’s been two weeks. They haven’t gotten much done around the inn, because it feels like every time they turn around they end up back here. Or on the rug in the living area. Or outside under the sprawling expanse of the sky, where it feels like they could both just tip up into it, and making love under its blanket is a marvel in itself.
“Ed,” Stede says, and Ed says, “Yeah, yeah, c’mon,” and Stede says, stroking over Ed’s hips with hands gone shaky, “Want me to fuck you harder, baby?”
Testing it out. Seeing. He likes the way the endearment slips off of Ed’s tongue in his smoky rumble. It makes him feel like…like something precious, something to be touched with delicate hands and cherished. He’d always thought of himself as cumbersome, bodying his way into spaces too small for him, pressing up against people in all the wrong ways.
Being with Ed doesn’t feel like that. There’s so much room with him, ways to be himself Stede never could have imagined. Ed offers the same kind of freedom that pirating does, but in ways that make his heart swell.
Ed lets out a little whine, the motion of his hips faltering; Stede takes the opportunity and plants his feet flat on the bed, pushing his hips up into Ed’s weight on top of him. It upsets his balance and has Ed pitching forward with a surprised noise, barely managing to catch himself with his palms flat on Stede’s chest.
His hair curtains around them, blocking out the rest of the world. Ed’s eyes are dark and wide, mouth slick-red and open with his rapid breathing. He’s looking at Stede like he’s the only thing left. There’s trust there, beneath those peeled-back layers. Soft-bellied and warm. Ed spreads his knees and arches his back and closes his eyes with a moan.
“Baby,” Stede says again, and it’s worth it for the complex network of emotions that pass over Ed’s face, and for the way he opens eyes gone soft with adoration. Their bodies meet in the middle, push-pull in tandem that’s as easy as everything between them has been. Stede loves him. He loves him so much he feels as if it could seep out of him.
“Fuck,” Ed moans. His thighs tremble and tighten around Stede’s waist. His voice grows thin as a furrow appears between his brows and he shudders. “You’re gonna—oh, yes, there —gonna make me come.”
“Please,” Stede rasps, sliding his hands around to grip onto Ed’s arse and guide the unsteady, desperate rocking of his hips. He needs it. He needs to watch Ed come, needs to see him fall apart and know that it’s because of him, his body and his words and his cock. “God, Ed, let me see it. You’re so good for me, you know that? I love you so much. That’s it, love, c’mon. Show me how good I make you feel. Come for me, Ed, please.”
Ed makes a sound, a high-pitched thready noise, and grinds into the cradle of Stede’s hips as he reaches between his legs and takes himself in hand. It only takes a few strokes before he’s shooting off warm and wet across Stede’s chest. The spasming clench of him around Stede’s cock drags him over quickly, and he frames Ed’s face in his hands, kisses him and shudders through his own orgasm.
——
Stede tries sweetheart. It’s said in passing, a hand on the small of Ed’s back over the soft velvet drape of his favourite robe one morning. He likes that one, too, because it makes Ed kiss him immediately after, his hand fisted in the front of Stede’s shirt, a mug of tea held precariously away from their bodies. And, after, kissed thoroughly breathless and pleased with it, Stede says, “You like that one?” and Ed says, “‘Course I do. I like being sweet. Like knowing you think I am.”
Ed says other endearments as well. He’s said sugar, and angel. Stede will take any and all of them, even mate, because Ed makes it just as fond and loving as he does something one says to their beloved. It doesn’t carry the same cadence as it does to the shopboy Ed says it to on Thursdays; there it’s conversational. With Stede, it’s quiet. It’s intimate.
A month passes on their little island. Some work gets done: the roof gets patched, and a new pane of glass for the broken window gets purchased once they budget out the treasure taken from the Revenge. It’s still less of an inn and more of a ramshackle home, but Stede finds that he rather likes this particular limbo. He and Ed have never gotten to be truly by themselves, to learn each other away from a ship full of prying eyes, and it’s nice.
There’s a small village nearby that they visit frequently, and Ed quickly makes friends with most of the vendors in that easy way he has, charming them with his gilded words. Slowly, they gather more furniture, more kitchen utensils. They pick up hobbies. Ed discovers that he likes the routine methodicalness of breadmaking. Something helpful with his hands, he says, and he doesn’t say what Stede knows he’s thinking: that it’s a sort of mending for all the harm they’ve caused. Proof that they’re just as capable of crafting something wonderful as they are at causing pain.
Neither of them are innocent, but Ed takes it harder than Stede. He still wakes up some nights in a sweat, jolting upright in bed. On those nights, Stede pulls him in, strokes through the parts of his hair that aren’t sleep-tangled. He calls him baby and sweetheart and my love until Ed’s breathing and his heart slow. Sometimes he cries. Sometimes he doesn’t. Most times, he rests his head on Stede’s chest and falls back asleep in minutes, exhausted.
Stede has nightmares, too, most often about a wooden plank stretched over the deck of the Revenge and a splash below in the dark. In his dreams the darkness extends forever, just an empty vast nothing as he too falls.
——
“I love you, you know,” says Stede in the twilight. A lantern flickers next to them on the porch. In the distance the ocean hushes onto the shore. The world seems so small when they aren’t at sea. He misses it, sometimes. Finds a yawning chasm in his chest that cries out for the freedom of a ship gliding over the waves.
Piracy was meant to be a fantastical adventure, though Stede had never allowed him to think of how long it would last, or how it would end. Deep down he assumed it would end the way many of the stories do.
He recalls when he and Ed met, that awful liminal time when he wove between life and death when he wasn’t sure what was real or not. He’d been prepared to die then, even if he hadn’t wanted to.
Glancing over, Ed reaches between them and takes Stede’s hand, tangling their fingers together. The heel of his shoe shushes through the sand and dirt in the pathway leading up to the porch. He smells like sweat and sun, like patchouli from the incense an elderly vendor sells twice a week. It’s a home scent, Stede abruptly realises with a jolt deep in his belly.
“I know,” Ed replies. “I love you, too.”
He means it. Stede knows he does, and it’s comforting, and they don’t need to say anything else. Not until the moon climbs into the sky, a hazed silver reflection on the sea, and when Ed asks Stede extinguishes the lantern and follows him into their home.
——
Coincidentally, darling happens the day that Stede privately decides that Ed is it for him.
He doesn’t mean to think it, and it doesn’t intend to coalesce into something tangible. But as he looks at Ed, sitting across from him at their small kitchen table, still sleepy-looking despite his second mug of tea, he just knows: there will never be anybody else. He doesn’t want there to be. He thinks of Lucius and Pete, and their matelotage, and the glance Ed hadn’t noticed Stede catching. It struck him quickly, fiercely. He loved Ed in ways he never knew he could be capable of, and Ed loved him in turn.
They’ve been retired for over a month now. Stede had been certain in those early days that this feeling would eventually peter out, or plateau. None of that has happened; if anything, it’s grown stronger.
Their inn still isn’t much of an inn, but there are some whims Stede is fine with not immediately following up on. It means days like today, where they wake slowly and don't rise from bed until they have gently coaxed sleepy orgasms from each other in the warm morning sunlight. Hedonistic, Stede thinks as he watches Ed lick his come off his fingers. His heart skips in his ribcage. He’d go again if he could, and Ed laughs when Stede tells him that.
“Reckon it’s a good thing we met when we did,” he responds with a wink before swinging his legs over the edge of the bed and standing.
After breakfast, when Stede is still knee-deep in thoughts of marriage while he washes a mug, Ed comes up behind him. He wraps his arms around Stede’s waist and presses his forehead to the back of his neck. Every inch of their bodies that touch tingles, and Stede lets out a contented sigh, pressing a soapy hand over Ed’s. “Yes, Edward?”
“Do you wanna, I dunno, go to the beach today, maybe?” His voice is muffled against Stede’s skin, and oh, Stede loves him, he truly does. Ed is so bold in the bedroom, bold in the world outside of it, but when it comes to things like this he turns bashful.
“Are you asking me out on a date?” Stede teases, knowing he’s correct with the way Ed’s grip tightens on him and his breath stutters across his neck.
“Maybe I am.”
“Well now,” Stede tuts, turning around in Ed’s embrace so that he can loop his arms loosely around Ed’s neck, looking carefully at where a faint blush crawls across his cheeks, “I would say yes, of course, but only if I know for certain.”
“Dickhead,” Ed mumbles, but he’s smiling. He leans in and Stede lets himself be kissed; soft, slow, sweet. Tea and the taste of Ed. Home, like the cedar-smell of their house, like the salt of the sea and the breeze on their faces. Home isn’t just where you lay roots, Stede’s come to realise.
When they part, Ed’s eyes are so hopeful. Stede will never say no to him. He’ll say yes until his voice gives out, or until the earth crumbles away.
“Stede,” Ed says theatrically, “would you like to go on a beach date with me?”
“I would love to, darling,” Stede says, and Ed’s grip tightens. His eyes grow round.
“Oh,” Ed breathes, voice sounding a bit wobbly. His throat bobs as he swallows and manages to add, “That’s a new one.”
It had been an automatic response, instinctual like it seems most things are with Ed. But it doesn’t bring with it the dread Stede feared it would. It doesn’t make him think of Mary, and a stuffy marriage, and being so unhappy the only solution was to run away.
He’s tired of running away. Everything he needs is here.
“I think I rather like it, don’t you?” Stede asks, his own voice going wobbly. It feels bigger than them. He slides his hands up to cradle Ed’s jaw. He strokes his fingers across the stubble on his cheeks, dips into their hollows and says it again, darling, followed by my love. He kisses Ed again with the shape of it still on his lips.
”It’s perfect,” Ed whispers, hands on Stede’s chest. “Say it again.” Stede does, punctuates it with another kiss. “Again. Please.”
”My darling,” says Stede, and Ed shudders, pitches forward and kisses Stede with such unfocused desire that he knows their date is going to be relegated to the bedroom instead.
Stede could think of worse things. Much, much worse things.