More by Himring

II.

Fingon:

He lifts his head from between my thighs.

‘All right?’, he asks me softly.

‘Better than all right, and you know it’, I answer him.

He smiles. For a moment he rests his cheek against my hip. I feel his breath slow against my skin, feel  my own breath slow, too. He gathers himself and moves upwards to bring us face to face again. I put my arms around him and then turn around and weigh him down with my chest and shoulders for good measure. There. I have you. Just try to wriggle out of this. Not that he’s showing any inclination to move away from me any time soon. But whenever he does, it will be too soon for me.

‘Can’t get enough of you’, I whisper in his ear. ‘I keep wanting more...’

On any other occasion, he would probably have taken this in the spirit it was intended in. Today, perhaps because he will have to leave again so soon, it seems to strike a nerve. His lips thin; a line at the corner of his mouth accentuates.

‘I can’t help feeling that I’ve wronged you—in this as much as in the other, more obvious ways. Someone who could be with you openly, who could be with you always...’

‘No.’

‘No?’

‘No. It was always going to have been you and nobody else. It is true that if you hadn’t taken the first step, I might have lived all my days in Arda without recognizing it. I had too many other names to call my feelings for you, too many alternative explanations to even realize that the right one wasn’t on offer. But do you truly think that you could have set me alight as you did, if I hadn’t been tinder waiting for the spark?’

He regards me hopefully, sceptically, as if my answer were a children’s tale that he is a little too old to believe entirely, but can’t bring himself to give up on. I kiss him fiercely, by way of proof.

‘Don’t you dare claim all the responsibility!’