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[rowancrowned]

 

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[elegiaque]

One of the cleverest parts of the design that she and Alexandrie had dreamed up together, heads bent over their sewing, is that there is nothing in Thranduil's request that requires she divest herself of all of it. The looping, pearl-dusted roses at her hips look like pure decoration but the way she touches one with her thumb, contemplative, suggests something else as she rises up on her knees and slides her hand from his hip to the middle of his abdomen, skirting where she imagines he would like her attention.

“It's a very nice robe,” she allows, sliding backwards off the bed to her feet so she can pick it up, holding it against herself. Casual, like it's nothing to her that he's lying naked less than feet away. Half-turning, so she can see herself in the mirror and study the way the fabric falls when she drapes it over her shoulders.

She stands at the end of the bed, pulling the looped roses at her hips loose and letting the fabric of her smalls drop to the floor, stepping ever so delicately out of them, smoothing her hand flat against her own stomach as she considers her reflection, then her husband. Removing the remaining pins in her hair one by one—slowly, taking care to set them down on the vanity behind her—she unwinds two long ribbons from within her braids and she says, “Hold onto the headboard for me. Make yourself comfortable.”

[rowancrowned]

This game is running the line between punishment and a show, and he aches at the contrast. How long had she played at touch-me-not—hardly in a coy way, never the ingénue when it had come to the space between them—but in the hesitating courtship, until he had made mountains of being allowed to touch her hair, kiss her, and she the same for him. And then there are their absences, where she withdrew to her grandfather’s house (fewer and fewer now) and he fretted at the absence of her, distracted by her absence and confused as if she had taken his right hand with her presence.

This is worse, in that she is there—and his body won’t let him forget it, perhaps she would forgive the slip if he disobeyed, if he came to her and bit at her neck, and held her as tight as he rarely allows himself to do—but he cannot touch her.

His hands find the headboard—or rather, a carved element of it—and fasten, fingers overlapped. He wants to pull the satin ribbons from her hair, his teeth itch at the carelessly discarded pins.

He says, “You will be the death of me.”

[elegiaque]

In profile, she lets her hair spill down and shakes it out, tosses it over her shoulder, pulls the ribbons free entirely and pulls them taut, testing. Nothing he can't easily free himself from if he sets himself to it, nothing she wouldn't release him from if he called halt—more than sufficient for what she has in mind, and smooth, and soft, and not like to scrape unpleasantly against his skin. A bruise she wouldn't mind leaving, but a burn would never do.

“Probably,” she agrees, light-hearted, resting a knee on the end of the bed and appreciating, for a moment, the image that he makes.

If she gets little from his submission, his self-evident want for her is always—gratifying. Gwenaëlle feels powerful with him, even beneath him; she never shies from a reminder that he, too, needs her. A comfort, when it terrifies her how much she relies on him, how quickly she couldn't bear to be without him. She might be a little mad for him, but it's mutual, so it's all right.

The lopsided tilt of her smile is intimate, private, a thing for him only. A soft look she never directs to anyone else, any more—

rather at counterpoint with the way she clambers up his chest, and sets to the business of binding his wrists to their bed with her hair-ribbons. She has been planning this; she has had this in mind, at the absolute least, all day. Her weight is a pleasant warmth not conveniently near either of the places he might want her, too far from his mouth and his prick both, close enough to be maddening.

She adds, “You'll thank me for it,” because she is a loving wife.

[rowancrowned]

“I will welcome it,” he vows, all that might be implied in such a statement filed awake in the wake of his increasing awareness of her body and his irritation drawing him like a taut bowstring. She binds him with satin ribbons better than others might with cold iron chains, and he goes to them willingly, the only strain—and it is light—to make sure his blood will not pool in his wrists and palms, when it is so urgently needed elsewhere.

Also, he is disinclined to break their bed.

“Beloved,” he says, caresses the word, vowels stretched Sindarin-long. “Come closer. Let me please you. I cannot manage it when you are so far away.”