Chapter Text
She wakes long before he does, the golden light of dawn bleeding through the curtains far more than she’d like. Asriel doesn’t stir – and she finds herself staring, at the lines of his face relaxed in sleep, at the way the sunlight shines in his hair. She doubts she could have ever imagined him looking so peaceful.
He doesn’t wake as she slowly moves from under the blankets, though he does seem to shift somewhat towards where she was laying. His dæmon doesn’t stir either, though hers is as awake as she is. It’s easy enough to find her robe and slip away from the room, unnoticed.
She hasn’t seen most of the house yet. She’d arrived in Oxford late the night before, and their priorities had been somewhere besides a tour. Besides, she does want to make her own judgements.
The house is smaller than she would have expected, nearly modest – if Asriel was even capable of that – and furnished much the same. On the surface, everything is almost simple – polished wooden furniture; light linen curtains framing the many windows. But Marisa knows what well-made furnishings look like, and though they are plain, they are not cheap.
She finds herself taking pause in the kitchen, running her fingers over the weave of the Damascus linen curtains before throwing them open, the dawn light streaming in.
She searches for a kettle and her dæmon searches for tea, and soon enough she sits at the dining table with her hands wrapped around a mug, and he sits in the window, watching the branches sway on the trees outside. The house is surrounded by them, shielding it from the view of any passers-by, and she’s glad for it.
They both hear soft footsteps coming from behind but neither of them react, instead merely waiting – she wraps her hands closer around the mug a split second before she feels Asriel’s fingers brushing at her hair, and then his lips against her neck.
He almost growls his “Good morning,” and she is acutely aware of her own heart rate – no matter how much she feigns calmness, he would all but be able to taste her pulse, pressed as close to her as he is.
“I thought you might have woken me up,” he murmurs, every other word punctuated with an open-mouthed kiss, travelling the length of her neck, and she can’t stop her breath from growing quick and shallow.
Her voice is fainter and far less firm than she’d like, as she tries to mutter, “I was going to—” before his hand is against her cheek, and she’s twisting to face him, and her words are lost against his tongue.
She’s not sure how she manages not to drop her mug, but he breaks away from the kiss and pulls it from her hands, placing it – well, somewhere, she’s not entirely paying attention, her focus entirely on him. She pulls him closer again, not giving him the luxury of being the first to move, and as she kisses him, she can feel a moan coming from somewhere inside him more than she can hear it.
She can feel his hands reaching under her thighs, and she lets them, lets him lift her onto the table, with his hands still under the satin of her robe. All the while, he doesn’t break the kiss – she won’t let him, with her hand curled against the back of his neck – and he pulls blindly at the belt of her robe all the same, letting it slip down her shoulders before finding the newly exposed skin with his lips.
She’d planned on teasing him, drawing their morning out, prolonging things, with whispered comments and brushes of fingertips so light they could have been imagined. Instead, the sudden urgency leaves her with her nails scoring red marks against his back, and his fingers digging into her hips hard enough to bruise.