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Teia’s fingers are gentle, soft. They slip through the curls at the nape of Marisol’s neck and trace along her collarbone. Her breath is warm, humor hidden in a sigh that skates over Marisol’s ear, sends a shiver down her spine.
Watching. Waiting.
“It’s not going to happen,” Mari draws out the last word, rolling her eyes backwards at Teia. “As I said.”
Against her hips, Viago’s fingers tighten. His grip, by contrast, is firm, demanding. Straining with tension, desire forged in hard steel lines.
“Patience never has been your strong suit.” Teia tugs lightly on one of Marisol’s curls. “Give him more than a moment.”
“Why? He’s not going to—“
“You are impossible,” Viago huffs. But says nothing else, and Marisol tilts her head back to press pliant, coaxing kisses along the line of Teia’s jaw.
“We might as well move on. He’s never going to ask.”
Teia reaches over Marisol’s shoulder to sweep her thumb along Viago’s cheek.
Considering. Calculating.
“Perhaps he won’t.” Something catches in her concession, something sly and impish. Something that curls in Marisol’s core like honey spooned into hot tea. “But I will.”
Her fingers tighten in Marisol’s hair and— ah.
“On your knees, my love,” she presses a kiss to the soft skin behind her ear, “for me?”
And— it doesn’t come naturally. Her spine wants to stiffen and her fingers twitch with ice that her feet want beneath them. To slide away. Escape. She does not like to stand in the shadow of anything that even plays at a yoke, a leash. Even one meant only for pleasure. Even one made only of words.
Except—
The other thing that catches, the lift at the end of Teia’s voice, the path laid down with a choice to walk it.
(And this is what Viago never grasps— stern and demanding and possessed of an unmatched ego. He could never do what Teia does.
She asks.)
Marisol sinks to her knees.
It is different, looking up at Viago like this. Even on her feet, when he towers over her, she never stands short— confident and cocksure, buoyed up to eye level by unwavering certainty. Now, she turns her eyes up through her lashes, looking as perfectly contrite as he knows she isn't.
"Enjoying the view?" Of course he is. Even with Teia's hand still in her hair, the sight of her at his feet is— heady. His cock twitches in his trousers and a smirk cracks the facade of obedience she'd been playing at. "I thought so."
Her fingers skate up his calf, thumb tracing the shape of his knee. She leans in, presses a kiss to his thigh, and then to the soft skin at the juncture of it. Skips over where his arousal strains against cloth and repeats the gesture on the other side.
He glares— but there's nothing to say, not with his breath caught in lungs that refuse to move. Something complicated makes a nest in his throat, something sharp made soft, something rough made smooth.
Something dangerously close to longing.
"Don't get used to it," Marisol murmurs. With a quiet laugh, Teia slips flush with Viago's back; his fingers take her place in Mari's hair, firmer, insistent. But she doesn't move. A playful smile teases at the corners of her mouth while she waits for Teia's deft fingers to release his belt, his laces, and push his trousers down.
He's hard and leaking and his hips jerk when Marisol's breath ghosts over his sensitive skin. Partially bared now, her smiles leaves traces of lipstick on his skin as she kisses over his hipbone and across the flare of his stomach.
His gloves tighten in her curls. "You are—" her lips stray perilously close to the base of his cock and his breath hitches "—terribly inefficient."
At that, she laughs. Her amusement vibrates against his skin, singing through his veins and up his spine. The blunt flats of her teeth scrape against him as she smiles.
"I don't think efficiency is the point, Vi."
A biting retort jumps at his tongue, but fizzles out as her lips drag up the length of him. She kisses his tip with all the tenderness she offers anyone but him and it takes everything he has to keep from thrusting like an untrained fledgling. His nails press leather into her scalp.
"I think," she hums, one hand catching at the part of him her mouth wouldn't reach. Her calloused skin is rough, a pleasure all its own, except she gentles her touch and it's so far from enough. "I think it's not that I'm inefficient, Vi— it's that you're impatient."
Indignation spikes through him, hot and immediate and potent, but she doesn't allow it to take root. Her lips close around him and her tongue finds the vein that runs along the underside of his cock and he—
He was annoyed, he remembers that much. But he can't find it in himself to care.
Pleasure is a luxury he seldom affords himself and he thinks, sometimes, that the Crows from House Cantori were set in his path as punishment for that choice. They know pleasure like an old friend, familiar steel forged into a weapon they use against him. One that obscures the sharp edges of a trap, laid just for him.
"Maker forbid you just enjoy yourself," Teia's voice is soft but also pointed, a reminder threaded through a needle that slides into his ear and down his throat. He swallows; it catches. "You think too much, Vi."
Again, his lips part with an answer, an explanation, a parry. But— and it is almost as though they practiced, and maybe they have, or perhaps he is simply not the only man to have the fortunate misfortune of this treatment.
(And isn’t that a thought he forces away, immediately, violently, with all the gracelessness of a foal newly delivered to the field—)
Marisol sheaths as much of his cock as she can take. His tip hits the back of her throat; she swallows and pleasure short-circuits any defense he might have mounted.
It whines from deep within his throat, something restrained yet pleading. Something desperate, yet wary.
Teia's fingers stroke soothing circles over his hipbones; for naught, with how he jerks when Marisol, at the limitations of her lungs, swallows around him again before easing back, peppering kisses down his shaft and tongues his slit.
A wicked grin lingers on the fringe of her lips, even as she tongues his slit. Normally an annoying thing that would have him scowling and huffing and stewing despite himself. He is so rarely pleased with the activities of her tongue, but Teia slides her palms up under his shirt and Marisol presses that irreverence against his heated flesh and he finds enough to make an exception.
Just this once.
His hand in her hair takes new purchase and he drags her mouth back down the length of him. She goes without protest— well, without much protest. She’s rather incapable of compliance with bucking, spitting like water thrown into oil. Her eyes flick up, toward him but past him, over his shoulder, landing where Teia’s murmurs nestle encouragement in his ear. Veins of gold in soft brown— they offer no respite, no contradiction.
As good as permission. This time, when his hand pushes against the back of Marisol's head, she goes willingly. And it does something— for his ego, for his pride, to the affectionate part of him that they've left pointedly unacknowledged— that the sharp, stubborn puzzle pieces of her slot together and give way under his touch.
(Never mind that it is not for him, never mind that it would all stop at a word from someone else. It is his cock on her tongue, his pleasure in her throat. His.
As she is not. Even having given herself to him, she is not his, she will never be his, except—
In that moment, heat crawling up the ladder of his spine and desire pooling in him like late afternoon shadows. Her on her knees at his feet. The rush of power and pride and ego, he thinks—
She is not his—
But in a way, she might be.)
He gathers her curls in his fist, just taut enough to draw her back and press her down. It is Marisol's turn to whine and it vibrates through him like a string, plucked. Enough to pull a groan— low, aborted— from him in return.
"Still feeling that she's inefficient, Vi?" Teia pushes on tip-toes to put her lips at his ear. He thinks to scowl, but there's a spark on Marisol's tongue and his vision blanks. His rebuttal dies a quick, gratifying death.
"I'm—" he chokes, on pleasure, on ego, on something shaped like something he would never name. "I—"
"Use your words," Teia teases, and he feels Marisol's lips twitch with a smile she can't bring to bear. The flat of her tongue presses against the underside of his cock and he thrusts— whines—
Teia's fingers curl around the base of his cock. "Go on, Vi," she whispers, "go on, come apart for us, come on her tongue, come—"
With a low groan, he spills down Marisol's throat, twitching against her lips, her tongue that offers no respite, working his sensitive flesh even as he holds her down, because she has never, not even once, known when to quit.
For the space of one heartbeat, maybe two, he floats in a blissful nothing. No shadows, no worries, no obligations— none of the usual beasts that haunt him. Only pleasure, only heat around his twitching cock, only his lovers— pliant and steady and willing— pressed on either side of him. The rush, the flood, the rapture of drowning before the lungs assert their earthly needs.
He gasps, and time picks up again. Teia's stroking the sensitive line up his navel; reaching for the dampened cloth on the wash basin nearby. Marisol draws back but doesn't stand. There's something— something mischievous in her eyes, some kind of warning in the press of her lips, something that Viago learned long ago as the shape of a blade, slicing open the core of him.
And sure enough, as Teia wipes lipstick and saliva and traces of his release from his softening cock, as Viago catches his breath, they steal it right back.
(He was a fool to think he might keep it, even for a moment.)
Marisol catches Teia's wrist and pulls it to her lips. Kisses her pulse, her palm, the pads of each finger. There's something— not planned, but something knowing in the way that Teia's thumb catches at Marisol's lip, dragging it down.
Viago's release sits on her tongue— his claim, her trophy, in equal measures. She looks up at him and her mouth does not move but he sees: the smirk, the challenge in her eyes.
(She is not his.
Except—)
He's only just come, so the efforts of his cock, taken by the sight, are mostly in vain. But he is bare between them, so it does not go unnoticed. Teia presses lightly against Marisol's chin and her mouth closes; her throat bobs and Viago, in tandem, swallows back a groan.
Teia draws her back to standing and the odd liminality of the moment abates into something more familiar. Marisol leans her cheek against Teia's palm, listens to whatever whims her Talon wants to whisper in her ear—
And grins, all teeth and teasing, the kind of thing that shatters Viago's post-orgasm high like the crack of a river’s thaw. Warm and welcome, but sudden, rushing rapids, and still a change. Still dangerous, in that way.
Marisol slides a palm, lazy and seemingly innocuous, up Viago's chest. Her hand loops around his neck and she pushes herself upright enough to kiss him.
It is— softer, than it usually is between them. They are teeth and tension, the tightrope between passion and anger. But this is gentle, inviting, and Viago isn't sure what to be wary of—
Until her tongue slips past his lips and his nose flares, surprise and a sharp breath.
He can taste himself on her. Still, lingering, and it is— it is something, and yet it is not. The bitter taste of him over the usual sharpness and spice that she kisses with. It is something, and it is nothing at all.
(She is not his. She will never be his.)
His hand wraps around her hip, a little more possessive than he usually shows, a little more covetous than either of them usually permits. She kisses him and kisses him and kisses until they're both breathless, the traces of his pleasure spread between them.
At their side, Teia's smile is a snake, coiled and content.
Marisol's hand on his neck keeps him close, and he's punished for allowing it. "Next time," she murmurs, and he scowls, feeling her insolence before it lands. It is, he knows, inevitable.
"Next time, you could just ask."