August 31: Tom/Daria, Cliche Pt. 10

[kinetic_elaboration]

720 more words, about 22 minutes

I remembered I can mark posts to ‘mature’ so, yeah, that seems right for this fic.

*

 

He looks up at her again, opened-eyed and vulnerable. The expression on his face unnerves her, and makes her realize all over again that yes, he is doing this for her. And he feels like hers. She wants to hold the back of his head steady while he kisses her, everywhere, all of her: that’s the spike of desire for closeness she feels, the shape it takes. Her breath trembles.

He leans down and kisses the inside of her left knee, with such care and gentleness, and such softness. No one has ever kissed her there before—obviously not, but somehow the action seems so foreign that she might wonder if anyone, ever, had been kissed just like this. The gesture feels unique to the two of them in all the world. Such a weird place to be kissed.

So vulnerable and so unusual and so ordinary: her knees. She doesn’t hide them. Who would want to kiss them? Who would find them attractive?

He trails another kiss, just as slow, to the side of the first, that much higher on the inside of her leg. The soft, hidden inside of her legs. He’s holding on to her lightly just above her ankles, over her boots, just enough to steady himself, or as if he didn’t know what else to do with his hands. Not grabbing at her legs, not forcing them open. They’re spread as wide as she wants them to be. Steady, comforting control in knowing she could keep them just like this, or snap them shut, or do anything else she wanted with them.

He kisses only a little higher, then switches to the other side, this time nuzzles his whole face against the inside of her thigh between kisses. She feels his tongue swiping out and tracing circles against her skin. A movement for its own sake but also a pantomime, a precursor, a promise. She’d told herself she wouldn’t, but her hand finds the back of his head and grabs into his hair, not to direct him elsewhere but to feel him, and to feel like she could, with the slightest tug, pull him wherever she wanted.

His forehead presses against her thigh, heavy there. Any further and he’d be under her skirt, even hitched up as it is. She wants him so much she feels stupid with it. But asking him to take off his shirt, telling him, allowing him, to kiss her knees, all that seems like it could still be play but asking him anything more, anything that really sounds like sex— Or some kind of sex. And he’s never even seen her without her shirt. Maybe he’d even say no. Maybe something about the proper order of things simply can’t be ignored.

But she doesn’t want to get naked for him. Not now. Her body has been hers and her own domain for too long, so carefully guarded, and the thought of him observing her, and so insistently, and so totally, feels like such a terrifying slip of control. Feels like a vulnerability that would chill her. If she could imagine it with anyone, it would be him. But the immensity of it, not a gift to him but a giving to him, feels… feels somehow unearned.

Not yet, she thinks. She’s not ready yet. She doesn’t want that yet. Not yet.

Readiness really isn’t the right answer. The balance between them is delicate. If she were to undress for him, she’d want him on his knees.

She looks down at him: the bend of his neck, her hand in his hair, the visible skin and muscle of his arms and his back. Hers. Her gaze slides lower, too. And she notices for the first time that he’s hard: she can see the outline of him, and she blushes hard at the realization of it. She’s felt it before while they’re making out, awkwardly there like an unspoken secret. But now he couldn’t hide from her if he wanted to. He’s as turned on as she is, maybe worse.

Is she supposed to get him off? Could she tell him to; could she just watch? Learn how by observation of his own hand?

What a terrible time, she thinks, deadpan in her own mind, to be caught up in this tangle of curiosity and nerves.